The Infamous Eight: 2015's memes, themes and big pieces

Take Windows 10. We insist

2015 was a big year for Microsoft, with Windows 10. The goal of Microsoft’s new client was to bury the Metro fiasco of Windows 8 and finally move people on from Windows 7, with a pragmatic embrace of traditional desktop with touch-screen future. Years late, Windows 10 was Microsoft’s tablet-friendly operating system.

Microsoft pulled out the stops, offering a year’s free upgrade.

But the glory was eclipsed by what emerged as a stealth campaign to push Windows 10 onto PCs, regardless of the owner’s choice.

Privacy became a hot subject, with Microsoft forced to pull a Windows 10 update for messing with users’ security settings, and bugs uncovered.

But when it came to really big, Windows 10 couldn’t top this: the biggest write off in Microsoft’s history – $7.6bn in its fourth quarter, over its failed purchase of Nokia’s mobile business announced in September 2013.

Microsoft has spent $7.2bn on Nokia, its second biggest deal - only Skype was bigger. Explaining its decision, Microsoft confessed: “The future prospects for the Phone Hardware segment are below original expectations". No kidding. Half a year later IDC reckoned Windows Phone was going nowhere – the vast majority of sales that had been made had been on Nokia’s handsets.

Spies spy, but some spies spy harder

US tech firms bridled at the UK government’s plans to mandate back doors into encryption on their products – things such as iPhones. But they had already been compromised.

The NSA and GCHQ had hacked the SIM cards used by millions of people, letting spooks eavesdrop on calls and data traffic. SIMs are used by AT&T, T-Mobile US, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers, according to the latest Edward Snowden documents bomb.

At the start of 2015 Lenovo was also caught penetrating systems, only for commercial gain. China’s PC maker was found to have installed not one but two pieces of code on machines to push crapware on unsuspecting users.

Lenovo countered with the defense that unnamed “other” PC makers were also doing this but it bowed to the inevitable. “Our goal, in the end, is to make this right,” Lenovo's CTO Peter Hortensius told The Register. "It's going to take a long road to earn trust back."

Oh yeah? Months later the existence of a Lenovo Service Engine (LSE) was uncovered, something built into the firmware that let unwanted software remain on systems even after it was discovered and supposedly deleted AND that presented a possible security back door. Lenovo pulled LSE from new desktops and quietly released a tool to remove it from others.

Bubble: think your way out of that, Mr. AI

Intelligent machines? The BBC thought so, running assertive news and features on the arrival of artificial intelligence in terms of the arrival of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000.

AI was certainly peddled hard by all of the major tech vendors.

Indeed, 2015 was the year of IBM’s Watson supercomputer while Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook evoked AI via their digital assistants on mobile phones – Facebook, late to the game, announced a limited beta of its M in August.

Of these, Microsoft pressed hardest, taking battle to Apple and Google by putting its Cortana voice-activated personal assistant on Android and iOS mobile platforms. This was a significant move as Microsoft had never before put its client-side apps on anything other than its own platform.

In the days of the hegemony of the PC, that was Windows. Microsoft took AI into augmented reality, with HoloLens – its counter to Facebook’s Occulus Rift. IBM wasn’t far behind: from solving medical problems to replacing lawyers to Christmas shopping, IBM let it be known its mainframe was capable of anything.

Cars were supposedly going “smart”, too, with Google pushing driverless vehicles.

The consumer and gadget-obsessed press land fanbois in every camp lapped up each twist of the digital assistant tale, but was there any substance? Was AI here. Again? Underpinning AI were machine learning and big data – the latter was recent years’ next big thing.

AI is the industry’s attempt to turn technology from something that does what we want into something that learns and that then anticipates what we might want, and to deliver that.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that firms are either collecting huge amounts of data on us – Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook – or those with vast amounts of computer power – the above, plus IBM – are looking for ways to use their existing digital assets to deliver this goal.

Enterprises are ready recipients of the ideas of AI, looking for ways to “get closer to” their customers, as they explored ideas founded on some of the building blocks of AI in big data and digitisation.

It’s a long march, complicated by the fact AI means different things to different people and that AI has existed as a concept for decades, so the goals have always shifted, and always seemed one step ahead of where we are.

Where were we in that long march in 2015? On the first step. ®