The decade in tech: Top 5 stories of the 00s

>> Charlie Cooper: It's been quite a decade for tech; 2000 started with the .com bust and now it's ending as we try to recover from a second economic bust and in those years was a lot of tech innovation. Here to discuss the five big tech stories of the decade is Larry Dignan, Editor and Chief of ZDNet. Welcome Larry.

>> Larry: Anytime.

>> Charlie: Number 5-SAS, horrible acronym for Softwares and Service why do we care? Well the concept here is back in 2000 it was kind of a journal of an idea that we would offer software over the web as a service and you're basically renting; and companies like salesforce.com kind of grew up on this idea now they're fairly big companies.

>> Charlie: What changed? In the late 1990's you had something called the ASP model.

>> Larry: Yeah that's another bad acronym.

>> Charlie: Another horrible acronym but the idea was similar where you would basically rent out applications from a third party. It collapsed when the boom went bust why did it take root in the 2000's?

>> Larry: I think it was browser technology. And the other thing is it sort of really accelerated in the latter part of the decade because companies were looking to save money. IT's spending just got squeezed. So SAS looks great to a CFO because it's operating expense, it's predictable and you don't have to fork over all this dough right away.

>> Charlie: And when does it become primetime for corporate America?

>> Larry: I think it's primetime now for some things and I think the next decade it will probably be standard course of business.

>> Charlie: Okay let's take Number 4; another big story in the middle of the decade social networking hits the scene. I figure you as a social network kind of guy. Why do you think it's such a big deal?

>> Larry: Well it's a big deal because it really changed the way we communicate right? I mean if you flash back to 2000 I used to call you on the phone; we'd actually catch up for a bear, shake hands and do all those normal things. Now it's like hey I can tell when you're eating breakfast on Facebook and Tweeting and all those other silly things. So I think we've raised the whole generation of people that may not be able to talk face to face but it's been a lot of upheaval.

>> Charlie: That's a good point. As this Twitter generation graduates into the work world, what can we expect as far as the embrace of these tools, this approach, into corporate America?

>> Larry: It's being embraced a lot now. Sales force actually has this thing called Chatter which integrates Twitter so it's all the social networking stuff that corporations monitor to gauge their reputation so it's being pretty quickly incorporated into the corporate fact.

>> Charlie: And marketers are using it to hock their products?

>> Larry: Yeah exactly.

>> Charlie: Okay number 3, Larry Ellison.

>> Larry: Yes Tech's most entertaining CEO.

>> Charlie: There was a time I recall when you basically said you know forget about this IT landscape. It's going to be consolidated and guess what? He consolidated.

>> Larry: Yeah he consolidated everything. He basically said software's mature, I'm consolidating this thing and we all kind of chuckled. Like back in 2003 he launches this big for PeopleSoft and I was one of the people that thought it would be a complete train wreck right? Because you buy a software company, the people leave, the customers leave, couldn't work. Well, it did work; you kept the customers and then he bought Seball BA assumed spelling now Sun.

>> Charlie: Similar to the European Unions.

>> Larry: Yeah, yeah. But anybody that's competing with me is kind of oh and probably end up buying Mark Benny off of salesforce.com at some point too.

>> Charlie: Bill Gates is out of now? Full time philanthropist?

>> Larry: Yeah.

>> Charlie: Larry Ellison, his old nemesis, is still in it. In terms of impact on the industry when the historians finally right the final chapter, Bill Gates or Larry Ellison?

>> Larry: Well I think Bill Gates will have a higher plateau, it will be on a higher pedestal but you can't rule out Ellison just for moxy. assumed spelling. And he is one of the few CEO's that will actually stay on a conference call that we're out to kick SAP's butt or he punches people in the mouth. That's kind of cool.

>> Charlie: Number --Apple. Used to be Apple Computer now it's finishing off as Apple, Inc. This ain't the company that was at one point supposed to be fish food for Sun, Dell. Remarkable, remarkable transformation.

>> Larry: Well yeah the last ten years have been absolutely crazy for Apple. The beginning of the decade was like the return of Steve Jobs, they were kind of getting on their feet. They were almost dead three years before that in the last 90's. And then they launched this little thing called the iPod 2001. I think a lot of us were like oh it's an MP3 player so what? These other guys have it but then they hook it up to iTunes, reinvent the music industry, make lots of dough. And then in 2007 they pulled the iPhone out of thin air and a very similar product in that people go well there are smart phones everywhere. What's the big deal here? Then they hook up the apps store and it's two billion downloads and then they rewrite the wireless industry. So it's going to be a very hard decade for them to follow.

>> Charlie: Can they do it without Steve Jobs? At a certain point he will leave the company to do whatever's next. Has the Job's DNA has that been passed on to Apple?

>> Larry: I think it's there because he had that hiatus for a while where the company was humming along pretty well but that's the big question for the next ten years.

>> Charlie: And numero uno talk about big successes Google.

>> Larry: Yes. If you flash back to 2000, actually I went back and looked at the Google history, Google was this little search provider for Yahoo and you look back at the next decade and you're like, "Boy was that a mistake." So they started to get some star attraction and I think they went public in 2004 at $85 bucks, another nice little deal there, and then it's gone from being this little spunky startup to being something that's in operating systems, search, play ads, applications, android, it's a monster. I mean you're literally like when you actually go back and look at it over the last 10 years--where did this company come from? How the hell did it get so big?

>> Charlie: And it's not coincidental that Google's assent has come at the same time that Microsoft's star if you will it's lost a bit of its luster.

>> Larry: Yeah I mean Matt Muger assumed spelling is still a juggernaut but yeah it's not leading the tech industry anymore and it's really been the decade for Google.

>> Charlie: Great stuff. Larry thanks for being here.

>> Larry: Thanks for having me.

>> Charlie: For more information on the topics we discussed today you can visit blogs.zdnet.com. I'm Charlie Cooper. Thanks for watching.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====