Best and Worst of 2011: A Landmark Year in Computing

Best Company: Apple
One company that is constantly in the news is Apple. The company exploded in 2011, with their  product portfolio consisting out of as simplest product strategy winning hearts and minds of hundreds of million consumers, breaking the annual revenue in excess of $100 billion. Secondly, the acquisition of Bruce Sewell from Intel proved fruitful, since Apple is suing left'n'right on their mission "to destroy Android".

Runner up: Intel
Rising from the embarrassment of Sandy Bridge platform recall and a billion dollar write-off, Intel saw the sales of their products going through the roof, with the strong demand for datacenters resulting in selling over a hundred million of Xeon processors. Consumers thoroughly enjoy in hundreds of millions Core-series processors, while Atom had a rough year, getting its market share destroyed by ARM chips from Qualcomm, Samsung, Texas Instruments and NVIDIA.

Runner up: Qualcomm
If you ask Intel insiders 20 years ago who their biggest competitor was, the answer was IBM. If you ask those insiders 10 years ago, the answer was AMD. Today, the company publicly admitted their "#1 Enemy" is a company out of San Diego, the mobile giant Qualcomm. The company saw record shipments of their SoCs, and we have never seen more mobile design wins by any other company: majority of smartphones and tablets have at least one Qualcom chip inside. Like it or not, that list includes iPhones and iPads.


Best Mobile Carrier: Telia
The award for mobile carrier of the year goes without any doubt to Telia. If you want to know how the future of mobile communication is going to look like in your country, then look at what is happening in Sweden. Telia deployed 4G LTE network offering full speed of up to 80Mbps, easily beating majority of line broadband speeds available worldwide. Those speeds also come at a very affordable price ($72 for unlimited). Telia today - your carrier tomorrow (if you're that lucky).

Runner up: Verizon Wireless
Battling with the infrastructure, Verizon Wireless raised up the number of users and successfully deployed a LTE network using 700MHz band, formerly the old analogue TV signal. Coping with significant number of users, Verizon delivered excellent service and a line of exciting smartphones (except for this week's outage).

Runner up: Safaricom (Vodafone)
Choosing an African telecom operator as one of world's finest isn't something you'd expect from majority of mainstream and tech media. Yet, we view Safaricom as a prototype of what the telecom of tomorrow is going to be. Safaricom deployed M-PESA service in three countries and is now looking dead set on replacing the wallet with a phone, regardless of name and type. This way, Africa is going to skip the period of cash and credit cards and go directly to an era of digital money.


Person of the Year: Sir Jonathan Ive
Since we gave out recognition to Apple as the company of the year, we decided to give proper credit to the creator of the success. Without this person, you would not talk about miraculous Jobs or ruthless lawsuit loving Sewell - since Apple would not create the IP other companies try to emulate. Jonathan Ive is finally receiving the proper credit for all the hard work he and his team put into creating near-perfect products which enjoy leading market share in nearly all the product categories Apple currently competes in.

Runner up: Andy Rubin
Without any doubt, 2011 was the year of Android. The operating system which enables seamless customizations from companies like Motorola, Samsung, HTC as well as modding scene gathered around CyanogenMod. Today, over 750,000 Android devices get activated daily, passing into the million mark on Christmas day.

Runner up: Choi Gee-sung
Samsung Electronics. The world's largest electronics producer came on top of every fight they've entered through relentless innovation and continuous leadership mentaility. You won't hear emotional responses. Secondly, unlike the majority of their competitors, Samsung is not the "Design in one place, Manufacture in Cheape... China". The company builds its products worldwide. All of this came as a direct leadership of Choi Gee-sung, CEO of Samsung Electronics. The company has fought Consumer Electronics wars against Sony, and is now waging a battle against Nokia and Apple.