Here are the year’s tech winners and losers:
LOSERS:
Virtual Reality
As the world adjusted to a new stuck-at-home reality, the
pandemic could have been virtual reality’s chance to offer an escape. With the
use of special headsets and accouterments like gloves, the technology lets
people interact with a 360 degree view of a three-dimensional environment,
seemingly a good fit for people stuck indoors.
But people turned to easier-to-use software and games that
they already had. Few rushed to spend hundreds of dollars on a clunky new
headset or tried to learn the ropes of virtual reality meeting software. And no
VR games broke into the mainstream. So virtual reality, on the verge of success
for decades, missed its moment, again.
Social media election labels
It was the year of labels on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and
even TikTok. Ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential vote, the companies promised
to clamp down on election misinformation, including baseless charges of fraud
and candidates’ premature declarations of victory. And the most visible part of
this was the bevy of labels applied to tweets, posts, photos and videos.
“Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed
and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” read one typical
label applied to a tweet by President Donald Trump.
But many experts said that while the labels made it appear
that the companies were taking action, ”at the end of the day it proved to be
pretty ineffective,” as Jennifer Grygiel a professor at Syracuse University and
social media expert, put it.
Quibi
Less than a year ago, Quibi launched a splashy Super Bowl ad
that posed the question “What’s a Quibi?” People may still be scratching their
heads.
Quibi, short for “quick bites,” raised $1.75 billion from
investors including major Hollywood players Disney, NBCUniversal and Viacom.
But the service struggled to reach viewers, as short videos
abound on the internet and the coronavirus pandemic kept many people at home.
It announced it was shutting down in October, just months after its April
launch.
Uber and Lyft
Fresh off of their initial public offerings the year before
and still struggling to show they can be profitable, the ride-hailing services
were clobbered by the pandemic in 2020, as people stopped taking cars and
huddled down at home.
In May, Uber laid off 3,700 people, or about 14% of its
workforce. Lyft also announced job cuts.
But there are some signs of hope. After significantly
reducing costs by restructuring in the second quarter, Lyft said last month it
expects to have its first profitable quarter at the end of 2021. And the
companies scored a major victory in California, where voters passed Proposition
22, granting them an others an exception to a law that sought to classify their
drivers as employees, an expense that analysts thought would have pummeled
their business in the nation’s most populous state.
U.S. TikTok ban
While India outlawed the popular video sharing app, in the
U.S. TikTok appears close to riding out Donald Trump’s term without the
president succeeding in his efforts to ban it.
Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked a potential ban.
It was the latest legal defeat for the administration in its efforts to wrest
the app from its Chinese owners. In October, another federal judge postponed a
shutdown scheduled for November.
Meanwhile, a government deadline for TikTok’s parent,
ByteDance to complete a deal that would have Oracle and Walmart invest in
TikTok has also passed, with the status of the deal unclear.
While President-elect Joe Biden has said TikTok is a
concern, it’s not clear what his administration will carry on the Trump
administration’s attempts at a ban.
WINNERS:
Nintendo Switch
Even in a year heralding splashy new consoles from Xbox and
PlayStation, the Nintendo Switch was the console that could. Launched in 2017,
the Switch became a fast seller. That was helped by the launch of the handled
Switch Lite in September 2019.
In March, it became hard to find a Switch as people searched
for ways to be entertained inside their homes. Boosting its popularity was the
release of island-simulation game “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” which
debuted March 20 and has now sold a cumulative 26 million units globally,
according to Nintendo.
According to the NPD Group, during the first 11 months of
2020, Nintendo Switch sold 6.92 million units in the U.S. It has been the
best-selling console in units sold for 24 consecutive months, a record.
Zoom
All video conferencing software from Microsoft Teams to
WebEx thrived during the abrupt shift of tens of millions of people to remote
working and schooling during pandemic. But only one became a verb.
Zoom Video Communications was a relatively unheralded
company before the pandemic hit, but its ease of use let to wide adoption
during the pandemic. There were some growing pains, including lax security that
lead to “Zoom bombing” breaches early on. The company revamped its security and
remains one of the popular platforms to host remote meetings and classes.
Ransomware purveyors
The ransomware scourge — in which criminals hold data
hostage by scrambling it until victims pay up — reached epic dimensions in
2020, dovetailing terribly with the COVID-19 plague. In Germany, a patient
turned away from the emergency room of a hospital whose IT system was paralyzed
by an attack died on the way to another hospital.
In the U.S., the number of attacks on healthcare facilities
was on track to nearly double from 50 in 2019. Attacks on state and local
governments were up about 50% to more than 150. Even grammar schools have been
hit — shutting down remote learning for students from Baltimore to Las Vegas.
Cybersecurity firm Emsisoft estimates the cost of U.S.
ransomware attacks in the U.S. alone this year at more than $9 billion between
ransoms paid and downtime/recovery.
PC makers
After beginning the year grappling with exasperating delays
in their supply chains, the personal computer industry found itself scrambling
to keep up with surging demand for machines that became indispensable during a
pandemic that kept millions of workers and students at home.
The outbreak initially stymied production because PC makers
weren’t able to get the parts they needed from overseas factories that shut
down during the early stages of the health crisis.
Those closures contributed to a steep decline in sales
during the first three months of the year. But it has been boom times ever
since.
The July-September period was particularly robust, with PC
shipments in the U.S. surging 11% from the same time in 2019 — the industry’s
biggest quarterly sales increase in a decade, according to the research firm
Gartner.
E-commerce
The biggest of the bunch, Amazon, is one of the few
companies that has thrived during the coronavirus outbreak. People have turned
to it to order groceries, supplies and other items online, helping the company
bring in record revenue and profits between April and June. That came even
though it had to spend $4 billion on cleaning supplies and to pay workers
overtime and bonuses.
But it’s not just Amazon. The pandemic is accelerating the
move to online shopping, a trend experts expect to say even after vaccines
allow the world to resume normal lives. And thanks in part to shoppers
consciously supporting small businesses, Adobe Analytics says online sales at
smaller U.S. retailers were up 349% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. At the
more than 1 million businesses that use Shopify to build their websites, sales
rose 75% from a year ago to $2.4 billion on Black Friday, according to Shopify.
JURY’S OUT:
Big Tech
Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google did well financially,
with each company’s stock price and profit up considerably since the start of
the year. They gained users, rolled out new products and features and kept on
hiring even as other companies and industries faced significant cuts.
But not all is well in the world of Big Tech. Regulators are
breathing down each company’s neck and that’s unlikely to ease up in 2021.
Google faces an antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice. And Facebook
has been hit by one from the Federal Trade Commission along with nearly every
U.S. state that seeks to split it off from WhatsApp and Instagram.
More cases could follow. Congressional investigators spent
months digging into the actions of Apple and Amazon in addition to Facebook and
Google, and called the CEOs of all four companies to testify. -AP
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