The year is going to be remembered for the banks, and I suspect that will turn out to be wrong in the way year-end summaries usually are. The loudest event and the consequential one are rarely the same, and three quiet things happened in 2008 that will still be shaping the industry when the financial story is a chapter in a book.
The first is the shop. Two companies built a place where a developer submits software once and reaches every owner of a device, taking thirty percent and requiring no negotiation with anybody. I wrote a few weeks ago about why that is the entire story and I would put it first on any list for the year. It ended a decade in which carriers decided what software existed.
The second is the browser Google released in September, which was built not to be sold but to force everybody else to spend money on theirs. Within weeks the competitors were publishing performance figures they had not previously bothered to measure.
The third is the cheap laptop, and it is the one being most misread. The commentary treats it as a downturn product, something people buy because they cannot afford better. The category was designed and shipped well before anything went wrong with the banks. It is priced for this moment entirely by accident, and it is going to do extremely well for reasons that will be attributed to the wrong cause.
Which is my main disagreement with the forecasts now appearing. The consensus is that consumers stop spending on technology. What actually happens in a downturn is that spending moves, and it moves toward things that are cheap, that replace a more expensive habit, or that are already paid for.
A three hundred pound laptop does well. A subscription that replaces buying things does well. Anything sold on being the premium version of something adequate has a difficult eighteen months.
The thing I would watch most closely next year is whether the shop stays open on reasonable terms, because a great many businesses are now being built on top of a door that one company controls, and none of them have a contract worth much if the terms change.