This New Year's eve there is no fear that two-digit clocks may bring down civilisation. A lack of millennium bug preparation is just one measure of technology's advance in the noughties. Another is the spin-out of AOL from Time Warner this month, with a market capitalisation of $2.5bn. At the 2000 merger, the company's value was almost 100 times greater and AOL was America's largest internet service provider, mostly dial-up accounts attracted by free CDs. The shift from the closed garden internet of AOL to today's anarchic online world is one of the biggest stories of the decade.
Hardware helped, of course, becoming cheaper, smaller and faster every year, such that military supercomputers can now be built from games consoles. But physical technology is mostly a tale of consolidation and commoditisation, where market dominance is the key to decent returns. Apple bucked that trend but largely thanks to software: grabbing the music market with iTunes and more recently building the App store around its mobile phone operating system.
The decade's clear winner, however, is Google, becoming a verb as it helped two-thirds of all internet users navigate the web. Free-riding the world's online content, it took revenues from $19m in 2000 to $17bn this year. Other sites have emerged to attract hundreds of millions of users, with social networks rising and falling as MySpace was usurped by Facebook. But as online work and play becomes ever more essential, no one else has yet managed to recreate Google's magic. The problem for many is how to support businesses on tiny advertising revenues. Ten years after a failure to find the answer silenced the dotcom boom, the solution remains elusive.