The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade
With only a few weeks left until we close out the 'naughts and move into the teens, it's almost obligatory to take a look back at the best and not-so-best of the last decade. With that in mind, I polled the O'Reilly editors, authors, Friends …
Context & Ripple Effects
Year-end list season closes out the 2000s with O'Reilly scaling the format up: rather than ranking a single year, it polls its editors, authors, and friends on the whole decade's best and worst tech. The move extends a tradition Wired helped establish mid-decade, when it published both its 2005 tech moments roundup and its best-and-worst gadgets of 2005 — but O'Reilly's twist is sourcing nominations from its extended community instead of a staff editorial bench.
First-order effects
- Readers get an O'Reilly-branded canon of the 2000s, assembled through the same community-leveraging model the publisher already uses for Foo Camp and its Hacks book series — the list doubles as a showcase of its network's taste.
Second-order effects
- Competing tech outlets face pressure to answer with their own decade-scale retrospectives before the window closes, escalating the year-end list arms race from annual to ten-year scope.
Third-order effects
- If decade retrospectives stick as a format, whoever publishes the most-cited 'best of the 2000s' list gains lasting influence over how the era's winners and failures are remembered — turning retrospective rankings into a durable media franchise rather than a seasonal filler.
The trend: Tech media is extending its year-end ranking ritual to decade scale, with publishers competing to define the canonical memory of the 2000s.