Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg with girlfriend Priscilla Chan. Photograph: Facebook
Benjamin Cohen, the Channel 4 News technology correspondent, reflects on a pivotal year for tech firms and looks ahead to the year when Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook will grow up.
? What will 2011 be remembered for?
The death of Steve Jobs. Love Apple or loathe it, he did manage to revolutionise a number of industries through an uncanny knack of perfect timing and design, as well as a knack of locking customers into closed, propitiatory systems. The challenge for Apple now is to continue his product roadmap, properly into televisions and beyond that create new products that in that makes us pay a little bit more for things we didn't know we needed, but then suddenly can't imagine living without.
I think 2011 was also the year that Google proved it understands people, not just engineering with the launch of Google+. It remains to be seen whether it will prove to be a long term rival to Facebook. That's a hard feat to achieve but it tapped into a growing public unease about how much is being shared online and to whom. The innovations it pioneered have in a lot of ways already been taken up by Facebook.
I'll leave it to others to talk about phone hacking.
? What was your best and worst moment
On a personal basis, it was the fascinating trip to Microsoft's HQ in Redmond to see behind the scenes at their research labs, touching, waving and talking to the future. It provided a glimpse of how a company too easily written off by some in the tech press continues to be gazing at the future, working on the sort of innovations that will shape our digital lives in the years to come.
My worst tech moment was discovering that my converted new iPhone 4S and its key feature isn't up to much, in the UK at least. ITN gave me mine a few weeks after I'd been playing with my American friends' phones in the US. Location-based services don't work here and in a sense, it takes away from the clever stuff that phone could do for you.
? What's your hot tip for 2012?
Facebook going public. It will probably be the biggest flotation ever in US corporate history and the success of that stock will determine the future market for internet investments around the world. When it does float, it will complete its transformation into a proper, grown-up company. Mark Zuckerberg, already responsible for 850 million peoples' private information, will also in a funny way have to shoulder the future property of millions of Americans' pension funds. If Facebook can't continue its revenue growth, as such a large player, it will bring into question the future performance of all of the most recent generation of internet-based listed companies.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2011/dec/30/channel4news-bejamin-cohen
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