Shocks aplenty
Phew! What a year. It will be interesting to see how history views 2008, but for a technology business journalist it was nothing short of hectic.
We were reminded just how hectic while looking back at the year's stories. As if high drama in the semiconductor sector - most conspicuously from AMD and NVIDIA - wasn't enough, we had the small matter of the biggest meltdown to hit the finance sector since the Great Depression.
The product trend of the year has to be netbooks, which redefined how people think of PCs. As we mentioned, the semiconductor companies all jostled with each other. AMD gave NVIDIA a nasty shock in the discrete graphics market, but NVIDIA came back strongly late in the year. Intel seemed content to cement its dominance of the CPU sector.
What follows is summary of the key stories of the year, from a commercial perspective, including one review per month from HEXUS.net. We've followed a brief summary of the month with hyperlinks to the top stories.
January
As ever the year started with CES in Las Vegas. Probably the big story of the show was the end of the next generation optical format battle, with Blu-ray emerging victorious over HD-DVD. This was overshadowed, however, by the remarkable sight of our own Nick Haywood being electrocuted live on TV
Warner Bros switches exclusively to Blu-ray
Macworld 2008: MacBook Air, world's thinnest notebook
Acer finally grabs Packard Bell
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 - getting back in the game
