The Best of 1999: Tech
1 eBAY O.K., so it's prone to outages. It has a few white
elephants. It may not even be the best auction website. But this
year, eBay became an economic phenomenon second only to the
stock market. Every day, 250,000 new items are added and 1.5
million visitors make bids. Even the President praised the site
and admitted trading on it. Is there anyone who hasn't?
2 DREAMCAST Few expected this game machine from Sega to make a
splash in the U.S. after it slumped in Japan. But it did,
clocking up sales in the millions thanks to an impressive lineup
of must-have, movie-quality games such as NFL2K and Soul
Calibur. The amphibious Dreamcast lets you surf the Net too. Not
bad for $199.
3 MP3s Not since CDs arrived has the music world been in such a
tizzy over technology. Mpeg-3, a longtime standard for digital
music on the Net, entered the spotlight this year when MP3.com
issued its IPO and MP3 players were declared legal. Now you don't
need a recording label to make it big--and industry execs are
playing catch-up.
4 SIM CITY 3000 More than just a game, this worthy successor to
the you-are-the-mayor classic takes world building to a new
level. The urban landscapes you can create are so detailed that
you can actually see people living in them. And the ability to
post cities online (at sim city.com) lets your legacy live on.
5 PALM VII So you want wireless Web access in your pocket? Which
gadget are you going to go for--a cell phone with its fiddly
little buttons, or a pda (personal digital assistant) with a neat
little stylus and large screen? The best answer this year was the
Palm VII, which gives you a smorgasbord of e-mail, news, sports
and stock tickers, all for $9.99 a month. By the way, it's also
an organizer.
6 EVERQUEST Materializing out of thin air like a magic cloak,
Sony's 3-D online fantasy world quickly stole the role-playing
crown from Ultima Online. Creating virtual Dungeons & Dragons
environments is all the rage--Microsoft has since started treading
the same turf with Asheron's Call--but Everquestšs superior
software puts it sword and shield above the rest.
7 GOOGLE.COM With sites such as Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite
constantly beefing themselves up into the online equivalent of
mega-malls, it's refreshing to find a search engine that does
nothing but search. And search well. Googlešs award-winning,
commonsense approach nearly always seems to come up with exactly
what you're looking for.
8 OMIKRON What other game boasts a virtual David Bowie? French
designer Quantic Dream drops you into a parallel world that owes
much to Blade Runner and 1984. With more than 400
locations--including the club where Bowie's character
sings--Omikron is a game you don't so much play as live.
9 LINUX November's anti-Microsoft court ruling was the icing on
the cake for Linus Torvalds' operating system. Because it is
"open source"--anyone can fix bugs in its code--Linux is the least
crash-prone system around. That makes it a credible alternative
to Windows.
10 THE ONION , The funniest site on the Internet (theonion.com)
shows no sign of losing its satiric edge. Now it has conquered
Old Media with the best seller Our Dumb Century. Web migration,
it seems, is not a one-way ticket.
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