Sun's OpenOffice.org, Solaris 10 Considered Significant March 8, 2010,
Volume 145, Issue 2
when it comes to technology, the last 10 years were actually a very good time for innovation and progress
-- eWeek
A special eWEEK report names the products, applications, and technologies of the last decade that have changed the way people work, play, and live. Limiting the list to 25 of the most significant technologies and products, eWeek found OpenOffice.org and the Solaris 10 Operating System to be two important solutions making a mark in the last 10 years.
OpenOffice.org
eWeek takes into account the free and open source office suite's overall impact on the IT industry, stating it has definitely been influential, especially when it comes to opening up document formats.
Solaris 10 Operating System
Containers virtualization, DTrace system instrumentation, and the ZFS file system are a few of the unique capabilities that brought Solaris 10 to the leading edge of operating system technologies, eWeek concludes. Also identified as impactful are Sun's OS's assistance in the x86-64 architecture and on the open-source-as-a-platform licensing strategy.
Below are snippets of eWeek's assessment of the other 23 technologies making the list:
3G broadband: With 3G broadband, smartphones, netbooks, laptops and even mobile offices can get pretty good Internet access pretty much anywhere.
802.11g: made wireless usable for most networking tasks and helped boost the spread of Wi-Fi to offices, homes, parks and hotels around the world.
AJAX: the mix of technologies that make up AJAX launched a web revolution, making it possible to build attractive and interactive web-based GUIs that didn’t require extra plug-ins or extensions and that worked well in most modern web browsers.
Amazon EC2: changed what it meant to own a server or even run a business: A large number of new businesses don’t even own server hardware – their entire operations run on EC2.
AMD64: Advanced Micro Devices built its 64-bit platform on existing processor technology, and pushed 64-bit processors into the mainstream.
Blackberry: quickly became a must-have mobile device, and it’s still pretty much the mobile device of choice for business users. By making it easy to stay connected anywhere, the BlackBerry certainly boosted productivity.
Blade servers: have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget how stunning it was to see an entire server room of systems reduced to a single rack.
Bluetooth: consider all of the wires and cables you aren’t using anymore, and you come to appreciate the accomplishments of Bluetooth.
Firefox: reignited the browser wars, and today we have more competition and choice in browsers than ever before.
Gmail/Google Apps: offered the features, convenience and reliability that Google did. Now, entire businesses are running using only Google’s web-based email and productivity applications.
iPhone/iPod: completely changed the smartphone market.
Mac OS X: a full rewrite built on a UNIX core, and since its release has pretty much set the bar for operating system usability and innovation.
Multicore processors: There in your system – which most likely cost less than $1,000 – is a processor that would smoke the most powerful servers and workstations of the 1990s.
Netbooks: achieving small size along with decent capabilities and low prices. While hardware vendors may hate them, netbooks continue to be popular with consumers.
POE (Power over Ethernet): companies that have moved to POE have seen major benefits, especially in the ability to run devices such as VoIP (voice over IP) phones, access points and other appliances without the need for a wall wart to provide power.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: it wasn’t until Red Hat launched the buttoned-down and subscription-priced Enterprise variant of its Linux distribution that Linux was truly ready – both in terms of road map stability and of business model – to truly storm the enterprise.
Salesforce.com: roved that companies would run vital enterprise business applications – even CRM and sales force automation – over the web.
Social networks: have had a significant effect on the way people and businesses connect and communicate.
Treo: the early Treo set the stage for and was very influential in the development of modern smartphones.
Twitter: has been massively influential and changed the way we all communicate.
VMware: Offering everything from simple-to-use products that let consumers run virtual machines to the most robust enterprise-class virtualization platforms, VMware has made it possible to run whole farms of servers with very little hardware involved.
VOIP, Skype, SIP: (VOIP) has reached a real state of usability. Skype helped show consumers how cheap and easy voice calls can be from a PC, while SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling eased standards-based interoperability among vendors, opening the door for the integration of many different kinds of products into the communications mix.
Windows XP: is certainly the most dominant operating system of the decade.
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when it comes to technology, the last 10 years were actually a very good time for innovation and progress 
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eWEEK's Top 25 Technologies Of The Decade
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