After a whirlwind 2006, you could be forgiven for thinking that 2007 would be a little quieter. Wrong: certainly in terms of technology, the year started with a bang and just kept going.
Behind the scenes at Guardian HQ, 2007 saw a few changes. We relaunched the technology website, moving from the classic Neville Brody design to one that brought the site and the newspaper closer together in feeling (and one that we're still using, as of 2009).
We also started the Tech Weekly podcast in December - you can still listen to that first episode if you want.
Anyway, as we near the end of our look back over a decade of stories - and the way the Guardian reported them - we come across a series of major successes and dismal failures. There were plenty of stories we had to leave out, but here are five of the big ones.
2007
• Pretty much the first thing that happened was when Steve Jobs confirmed a swelter of speculation by announcing that it was planning to launch a mobile, the iPhone. The device had been hyped up in advance, with plenty of speculation that Apple was planning to do something in the phone market. But the handset itself looked like something we hadn't seen before, and when it went on sale in the US people queued for days to get one. Not everybody thought it would be a hit, but by November, British customers could get their hands on it too - and O2 said it sold tens of thousands in a weekend.
• A few weeks after Microsoft finally made its latest operating system, Windows Vista, available worldwide. The first obstacle to overcome was the confusing array of packages, but after a series of driver problems that left people nonplussed, the impact was more damp squib than fireworks. By the summer, the rot had truly set in, and the computer industry pronounced its disappointment with the product.
• Cyberwar suddenly became a buzzword, with a number of incidents that appeared to up the ante global online warfare. After a political tussle involving a war memorial, the highly-wired state of Estonia was hit by cyberattack that left it reeling. That was followed, later in the year, by a string of strikes on western government targets that opened up a wide range of issues.
• One of the big stories of the year in British circles was the sale of music service Last.fm, which went for $280m to US media group CBS. We had a long history of following the company (literally right back to the very beginning) and had tipped in an article the previous year about whether UK entrepreneurs could produce a web success like YouTube. Maybe Last wasn't the same scale deal, but it was a significant boost for the country's startup stars.
• And after plenty of fits and starts, the BBC iPlayer suddenly got an injection of excitement in 2007. First off, a mildly depressing download service hit the scene in the summer - but then, after a rapid retooling, the streaming service that we're all familiar with was pushed out in December. The rest, as they say...
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