2000 to 2009: The Rise of Social Networks and Economic Crises - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 271

cause homeowners can no longer sell their houses for a profit. Municipal and state
governments and the federal government need better skills in operations research
and in economic modeling than they have today.
A combination of predictive analytics and intelligent agents that bring back rel-
evant data from web sources allows the construction of powerful economic plan-
ning tools that can chart risks for municipal governments, state governments, the
federal government, and corporations in many key industries.
Innovations of the 2000s
Leaving behind the two burst bubbles, we now return to other interesting software
issues that occurred between 2000 and 2009.
In 2000, IBM began to market a new storage method called flash drives or,
more popularly, thumb drives . These are small solid-state devices with persistent
memories that can hold information indefinitely without needing electric power.
These devices normally plug into a USB port.
The invention of thumb drives occurred in the prior decade, but their com-
mercial entry was in December 2000. Several companies and inventors have rival
claims to being the true inventor, and a number of lawsuits have been filed, some
of which are still unresolved. IBM; an Israeli company, M-Systems; Trek; and
Netac all have filed various patents and patent disputes. The bottom line is that
thumb drives are now the most popular method of storing information on com-
puters since they are easier to use than disks and much smaller.
January of 2001 witnessed the introduction of a new form of research tool and
a new method of creating such tools. This month marked the date that Wikipedia
first went online. Earlier research by Rick Gates and Richard Stallman contrib-
uted, but Wikipedia itself was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, using
concepts originated by Ward Cunningham.
More or less to the surprise of everyone, Wikipedia has grown to become the
largest and most widely used encyclopedia in the world. The method of having
the entries created by thousands of unpaid volunteers turned out to be extremely
effective and has since grown into a method for dealing with other kinds of prob-
lems and issues.
The first years of this decade witnessed the final results of an antitrust lawsuit
against Microsoft by the Department of Justice, which is fascinating in its own
right. The gist of the final decision was that Microsoft would no longer give away
Internet Explorer with Windows.