2015 – The Year of Tech U-Turns

Tech headlines often discuss the shiny new features or products that are introduced into our lives every few days, but in many ways 2015 will be remembered as the year of the U-turn. As we head towards Christmas, we have learned that Mozilla no longer plans to develop or sell Firefox OS smartphones and Dropbox have made a hasty retreat from offering an email service, all within a 24 hour period.

Microsoft earned themselves the reputation of being the master of U-turns in 2014, with all the changes to their Xbox One console, and they continued their trend of uncertainty with some good old-fashioned backtracking in 2015 too. First, there was the promise of a 'free' Windows 10 upgrade for all who succumbed to their desperate nagging every time they switched on their PC. The big headlines arrived in November when the software giant revealed that users took advantage of their unlimited storage offer to such an extent that they were forced to scale back the unlimited storage offer dramatically. Downgrading all of their customers for Thanksgiving and introducing a tiered pricing structure didn’t seem to go down too well with most tech fans for some reason that Microsoft couldn't fathom. I have an entire blog post dedicated to Microsoft on this topic.

It would be unfair to point the finger entirely at tech companies. Governments were no less. In fact the British government were forced to make their own tech U-turn after making more than a few crazy claims about encryption and nearly broke the Internet in the process. To make the world a safer place and access digital communications from WhatsApp, SnapChat, iMessage and Facebook Messenger, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided that banning end-to-end encryption would be the perfect solution to the world's problems. 

Of course, it didn't take long until tech firms joined forces to give governments a friendly warning how weakening encryption would actually damage the stability of our society where we take the safety of our bank accounts and online shopping almost for granted. This of course prompted a quiet retreat from the poorly thought out Government master plan. 

Over in the music industry, Taylor Swift famously sent a letter of complaint stating she would be removing her ‘1989’ album from Apple Music after they decided not to pay artists, writers or producers during the three month trial period offered to new users. What happened next was the interesting *double U-turn* where Apple instantly backed down, and Taylor Swift agreed to have her album back on Apple Music in time for their high profile launch.

Back in 2007, many will also remember Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPhone where he famously uttered the lines

”Who wants a stylus? You have to get em', put em' away. You lose them. Yuck."

Or the equally as famous line

“If you see a stylus they blew it” 

And yet, 8 years later we have a new larger screened iPad Pro that comes with an Apple Pencil which looks remarkably like – you guessed it - a stylus, much to the delight of Android fans who were trolling forums while rubbing their hands with glee.

Our timelines will soon begin to fill with the ubiquitous end-of-year lists featuring the biggest tech stories of the year. The usual suspects such as wearable tech, drones, big data, streaming, home entertainment, and tablets vs. hybrids etc. will all frequent the flurry of articles prompting many a debate and maybe even a healthy amount of reflection on the year gone by.

However, I would argue that the biggest story of the year was the lack of understanding of the technologies that dominate every aspect of our lives that forced many leaders and large corporations into backtracking or performing the dreaded public U-turn. These institutions need to exercise caution before making bold claims about services being unlimited or free and letting their mouths write checks that their companies simply cannot cash.

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