There are years that are watershed years, times where just extrapolating the present into the future isn’t enough.
For most of us, these years come and go and only in hindsight so we put it all together and take stock about what just happened.
It wasn’t until I read Tom Friedman’s article, “Dancing in a Hurricane,” that I was able to reflect that 2007 was such a year. Here is part of what he said:
What the hell happened in and around 2007? 2007? That’s such an innocuous year. But look again.
Steve Jobs and Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, starting the smartphone revolution that is now putting an internet-connected computer in the palm of everyone on the planet. In late 2006, Facebook, which had been confined to universities and high schools, opened itself to anyone with an email address and exploded globally. Twitter was created in 2006, but took off in 2007. In 2007, Hadoop, the most important software you’ve never heard of, began expanding the ability of any company to store and analyze enormous amounts of unstructured data. This helped enable both Big Data and cloud computing. Indeed, “the cloud” really took off in 2007.
In 2007, the Kindle kicked off the e-book revolution and Google introduced Android. In 2007, IBM started Watson — the world’s first cognitive computer that today can understand virtually every paper ever written on cancer and suggest to doctors highly accurate diagnoses and treatment options. And have you ever looked at a graph of the cost of sequencing a human genome? It goes from $100 million in the early 2000s and begins to fall dramatically starting around … 2007.
