2022 is not a good year for the technology industry. Maybe it is too understated to use the words of hardship, weakness and fatigue to describe it.
This is a confused and bitter year. In the context of the protracted conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the impact of the COVID-19 virus still exists, the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, global inflation remains high and the economy continues to weaken, the technology industry, which has been used to good times, cannot withstand the biting "cold wind" and has begun a difficult journey.
Whether industry giants or small and medium-sized enterprises, entrepreneurs or practitioners, this year is like sailing boats in the waves. Even if we go all out, we can't find the right direction.
Scarce IPO, shrinking wealth of technology rich people, collapse of cryptocurrency, disenchantment of automatic driving industry, crazy layoffs of technology companies One bad news after another is telling of the "depression" and "desolation" of the year. There is no way out, "endure" seems to be the only choice to get through the difficulties.
However, the long cold night is not without light.
This year is also a year of reshaping and transformation. Many technologies have opened a new chapter this year. New breakthroughs have been made in xenotransplantation, nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, quantum computing and aerospace, which will gradually affect human life.
It can be seen that even if the industry is in trouble, disruptive technological innovation may still "go upstream" and bring new hope. As the saying goes, "There is no way out when mountains are heavy and rivers are flowing again."
So, in this uncertain 2022 year, what are the impressive events in the field of science and technology?
The following are the top ten global science and technology hot events in 2022 rated by Sina Technology:
The game industry has different joys and sorrows: overseas "buy buy" crazily, and domestic carefully find the way
In 2022, the game industry at home and abroad can be described as a double heaven.
Although the situation is not good this year, the foreign game industry is still willing to pay a high price to play the game of "big fish eat small fish". At the beginning of the year, Take Two, the developer of Grand Theft Auto, announced that it had purchased Zynga, a social and mobile game publisher, for $12.7 billion. A few days later, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Activision Blizzard, a game giant, with 68.7 billion dollars, making it the largest acquisition transaction in the history of the game industry. In July, Sony bought Bungie, the developer of Halo, for 3.6 billion dollars. Even streaming media giant Netflix has bought several game studios this year. Even the old media, the New York Times, bought the crossword game Wordle.
Compared with foreign countries, the domestic game industry is not so nourishing this year.
Stimulated by many factors, such as the peak of epidemic dividend, the tightening of version number, the introduction of the most strict anti addiction policy for minors in history, the lack of product innovation, and the "cost reduction and efficiency increase" of enterprises, the game industry suddenly led a hard life. Although there is also a popular game of "sheep have a sheep", the industry is still in a state of "misery".
According to the data, in the first half of this year, the market revenue and user scale of the game industry showed a "double decline". Rich and powerful, such as Tencent and NetEase, can't make money lying down.
Under such circumstances, going to sea is inevitable.
However, the overseas market is not easy to win. On the one hand, the overseas game market has matured and become saturated. With the increase of overseas game manufacturers, the competition will become more intense; On the other hand, players have increasingly high requirements for game quality. How to produce good products and do a good job in "localization" operation is a problem that every manufacturer needs to face.
The year 2022 is coming to an end, although the game industry is still groping for opportunities in confusion. But the cold wind will finally subside, and the spring flowers may not be far away.
The live video tape is still hot, just a new "face"
Last year, as the head anchor and some popular stars continued to "roll over" their goods, the savage growth of live broadcast goods "suddenly" dropped. The old order gradually dissipated and a new situation gradually took shape.
This year, the once highly sought after head anchors have kept a low profile and carefully considered their own retreat. The risk of over reliance on a single platform has led them to try to put "eggs in multiple baskets". Therefore, it is becoming a trend for anchors to carry goods across platforms. On the Double 11 this year, Luo Yonghao, Liu Genghong and Yu Minhong, who have been focusing on selling goods in Tiaoyin, announced that they would switch to Taobao Live and achieved good sales.
On the other hand, in order to avoid relying on the head anchors, short videos and e-commerce platforms have also adjusted their strategies to increase support for brand self broadcasting. In this case, in June, Oriental Selection, which focuses on bilingual knowledge with goods, became popular, driving the share price of New Oriental up nearly 70% in ten days. Many brand owners have also stepped down to self broadcast or shop broadcast to capture traffic.
In order to catch the eyes of young people, various platforms also played "technology and ferocious life" this year: virtual people live broadcast with goods. However, from the current point of view, the technology of virtual anchors is not perfect enough, and the interaction with consumers is not comparable to that of real anchors. There is still a long way to go in the future.
In addition, after a year of adjustment and standardization, live broadcast chaos such as scalping, data fraud, and excessive pit fees have been improved to a certain extent, but the problem of counterfeit sales is still serious.
Even so, live delivery will still be popular next year, but I don't know how the industry pattern will evolve at that time?
Meta trapped in the nightmare of the metauniverse
This year is the year of Meta's "water reversal".
In the year when the name was changed to All in the metauniverse, Meta did not turn around, but became more and more bogged down. The company's investment in the Metauniverse has been losing heavily. From the beginning of 2021 to October of this year, Meta has invested a total of 15 billion dollars in developing the metauniverse, but has not yet received any real return.
Under the heavy burden, in November this year, Meta announced a 13% layoff and extended the recruitment freeze to the first quarter of 2023.
In this regard, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the company, blamed himself and admitted that he had misjudged the situation.
In addition, the privacy policy adjustments made by Apple to block Facebook ad trackers, users flocking to TikTok, internal objections of the company, and so on have all caused Meta to struggle today. To make matters worse, Meta has more than 20 executives leaving this year, including the company's No. 2 person, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, as well as important roles such as chief technology officer and chief revenue officer.
At its peak in September 2021, Meta had a market value of $1 trillion, and now it has lost nearly $700 billion.
It is still unclear whether the meta universe will prevail. Zuckerberg gave the metauniverse ten years, but can Meta still wait ten years? This is still unknown.
The "walled garden" will be broken. How will Apple break the situation?
Zuckerberg struggled there, and his most hated rival Apple also encountered some "heart wrenching" troubles.
At the beginning of 2022, this gold sucking giant ushered in a highlight moment: its market value exceeded 3 trillion US dollars, and it really became rich. However, under the influence of many factors, such as the global economic downturn, the Federal Reserve's "crazy interest rate increase", the consumer electronics market downturn, the tide of selling technology stocks, supply chain problems, Apple still failed to withstand the "headwind", and its stock price went down all the way. Today, its market value is on the verge of falling below the $2 trillion mark.
In addition, Apple's tightly controlled ecosystem has suffered unprecedented impact this year.
In October, the European Union gave Apple a "heavy hammer": it approved the new unified regulation of charging interface. From 2024, Apple must use the USB-C interface. Subsequently, the newly enacted Digital Market Act in Europe came into effect, and Apple will also be "forced" to open third-party app stores. What's more, with the EU's exploration, other countries and regions around the world may take measures against Apple later. Apple's "walled garden" strategy will face a major test.
As consumers' demand for smart phones decreases, Apple, which has eaten the iPhone dividend for 15 years, must also find new and breakthrough products to break the deadlock.
However, Apple has not seen the light of day for eight years, and the highly anticipated hybrid reality has long since disappeared. It is hard to avoid questioning: Apple's innovation is no longer good?
However, after all, people still have high expectations of Apple, which has revolutionized the industry.
Musk acquires Twitter: Drama keeps going
Elon Musk, the billionaire of the "playwright", is still creating topics this year. The most interesting thing is that he and the social platform Twitter have to say that the long and smelly "dog blood series".
On April 26, Musk proposed to purchase the platform at a price of $44 billion, and then tried to renege. This also triggered a dispute and lawsuit between him and Twitter for half a year. Finally, Musk "yielded" and completed the acquisition at the end of October.
However, as soon as Musk took office, he immediately fired the CEO, CFO, general counsel and other executives of Twitter. Without waiting for someone to take a breath, a few days later, he kicked out half of the employees of Twitter like a bully.
It's not over yet. He also canceled home office, forced Twitter's remaining employees to sign a struggle agreement, restarted Blue V's payment certification, bombarded "Apple Tax", lifted Trump's account, and blocked many journalists' accounts
It can be said that after Musk acquired Twitter, there were big news every week. The flow password was true and he understood it.
But these actions did not help Musk realize his vision of turning Twitter into a super app similar to WeChat. Not to mention, Twitter was not a perfect platform before this acquisition. It is hard to say that Musk can successfully transform it into his mind.
In addition, Tesla was more or less affected by Mask's distraction. Since the stock price hit a record high in November 2021, Tesla's market value has evaporated by about 70%, and Musk has lost his title as the richest man in the world.
At present, it seems that Musk's "hard work" on Twitter has not paid off. In just two months, many celebrities quit Twitter because of dissatisfaction with his new policy, and some advertisers have also suspended spending on the platform. The once social "overlord" seems to have collapsed.
Musk is also aware of the problem. He launched a poll to ask if he should resign as CEO of Twitter. 57.5% of netizens chose "Yes" for him.
The landlord's family also has no surplus food? Silicon Valley technology giants cut jobs crazily
As inflation intensifies, budgets shrink and technology stocks suffer, the 20-year crazy growth of the US technology industry will end abruptly in 2022.
Since this year, many US technology companies have announced layoffs in succession. In a few months, Netflix, Intel Lyft、Twitter、Meta、 Amazon, Salesforce, Stripe, Snap and other companies have successively launched unprecedented layoffs. Even Google and Apple, which have not yet announced layoffs, have frozen hiring.
According to the data of Layoffs.fai, a website for layoff statistics in the technology industry in San Francisco, 1007 technology companies have cut more than 152000 jobs so far. The peak was in November, when 51300 people were fired.
Some people think that the fierce competition for talents in Silicon Valley may be coming to an end. I wonder who can swim ashore when the tide is receding.
FTX light speed falls, and cryptocurrency industry falls into a long winter
This year is undoubtedly frustrating for the cryptocurrency industry.
In 2021, the highest transaction price of Bitcoin will be about 68000 dollars. Today, its price is about 17000 dollars, only about a quarter. Bitcoin has always been the most mainstream form of cryptocurrency. Although its price has declined and rebounded in the past, this year's series of troubles seem to be liquidating an industry once touted as the "financial future".
In May, the stable currency, backed by legal currencies such as the US dollar, promised to provide investors with security against fluctuations and maintain a value of 1:1 with the US dollar. However, as the United States faced the highest inflation in 40 years, the mechanism failed, which also forced investors to turn to safer investments.
In November, amid allegations of internal mismanagement and misconduct, the overnight collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX led to the destruction of $8 billion in assets. This has dealt a heavy blow to the cryptocurrency industry. Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of the company, also faced criminal charges. He was arrested in the Bahamas in December and extradited to the United States.
Since the 2021 industry peak, crypto investors have lost about $2 trillion, but some cryptocurrency believers and blockchain enthusiasts are still optimistic that this industry will usher in another spring. But many observers believe that there will only be more destruction in the future. Some experts predict that if regulators do not incorporate cryptocurrency transactions into a certain regulatory framework, cryptocurrency will face dark days.
The rise of artificial intelligence "against the wind"
AI is one of the few places where the technology industry is deeply depressed and depressed.
At the end of July this year, Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind announced the predicted structure of more than 200 million proteins, breaking one of the great challenges in the field of biology. Later, Meta also said that the company's researchers used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of about 600 million proteins from bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that have not yet been characterized.
On Tesla AI Day in October, the Tesla humanoid robot Optimus officially appeared, and demonstrated walking, turning, waving, simple dancing and other movements on the spot.
On the other hand, generative AI technology also ushered in an explosion this year.
This is a branch of artificial intelligence, which enables computers to quickly and convincingly generate all kinds of original content, including images and works of art to poetry, music, text, video, dialogue, and computer code.
For example, this year's very popular image generation tools, such as DALL-E2, Stable Diffusion and Midtravel, are relatively easy to use and can quickly produce extraordinary effects, which has set off a shock wave in the art world and disrupted the entire industry to a certain extent. These tools can generate realistic images and works of art according to simple text prompts within a few minutes, which has triggered a debate about whether the things created by artificial intelligence are art.
At the end of the year, the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI released a chat robot ChatGPT. It can simulate human language behavior and communicate with users logically and smoothly. Some observers believe that ChatGPT can replace search engines by answering users' questions more smoothly - although its accuracy may be reduced.
It is not known to what extent AI will develop, but the next prosperity may not be far away. Maybe this time next year, the year-end inventory will be generated by AI.
The dream of mankind is the sea of stars
In 2022, space is a busy place. Human beings have glimpsed the universe in an unprecedented way, and are constantly exploring space.
Abroad, in July this year, the James Weber Space Telescope began to observe the universe and took some eye-catching pictures, such as early galaxies in the universe. In the middle of September, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried a dragon spaceship carrying four passengers, and the four crew members of the spaceship were "all civilians". Later in the same month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) "Double Asteroid Redirection Test" (DART) mission spacecraft successfully hit the asteroid Dimovos, completing the first planetary defense mission of mankind. In November, after several delays, the United States launched a new generation of moon landing rocket "Artemis 1" to carry out unmanned flight around the moon.
At home, there is too much good news this year. The events that attracted more attention were: in June, the Shenzhou XIV manned spacecraft was successfully launched. In July, China's first scientific experiment module, the Questioning Sky Experiment Module, was successfully launched. In September, Chinese scientists first discovered the new lunar mineral "Chang'e Stone". In October, the solar exploration satellite Kuafu 1 was launched day by day. In the same month, the Mengtian experimental module of China's space station was successfully launched, and its transposition was completed in November, forming the basic configuration combination of "T" of the space station with Tianhe core module and Tianwen experimental module. Subsequently, Shenzhou 15 manned spacecraft was successfully launched.
Although not all space missions are going smoothly, and there will certainly be bumps on the way forward, this year, space exploration is really exciting! It can be predicted that human beings will chase the "Star Sea" faster and faster!
Turn into tears of the times: they exit sadly
Jorma Ollila, the former CEO of Nokia, once said when the company was acquired by Microsoft, "We didn't do anything wrong, but we don't know why, we lost." After that, people often lamented that sometimes the abandonment of the times is unreasonable.
This year, such exclamations may increase.
At the end of March, Xici Hutong, which was determined to be the "first gateway to the Chinese community", was listed for 1 yuan to transfer all 5 million shares. So far, this old brand forum, which bears the memory of the post-70s and post-80s generation, came to a close with a lot of regret.
In April, the old IT publication Computer World, which published the article "Dog Day" Tencent, announced that it was closed down. This paper media, which has recorded the development history of China's IT industry and witnessed the youth of many Internet giants, has failed to resist the flood of the Internet information age.
In May, Apple announced that the iPod product line would stop changing. At the age of 21, this product, which had turned Apple's fate around, was slapped on the beach by the back waves.
In the same month, the home stay giant Airbnb announced that it would withdraw from its mainland business. This is another foreign mainstream Internet company that failed in the Chinese market due to "acclimatization" after Google, Uber, LinkedIn and other products.
Coincidentally, at the beginning of June, Amazon announced that it would stop the operation of Kindle e-bookstore in China on June 30, 2023. After 9 years of operation in China, this once "reading artifact" has finally become a "instant noodles artifact".
In June, Microsoft announced the official retirement of Internet Explorer. From the initial "outshining" to the final "no one cares", the former browser overlord ended his 27 year life in the voice of complaining and nostalgia.
In July, the eBay Gateway, Taobao's former rival and the former "largest e-commerce business in China", stopped. In the same month, Zeng "kicked" WeChat's Feixin to stop serving.
However, there are still many products that have issued "farewell" statements this year, including: Youqi Cartoon, Baidu Nuomi, Tencent Map PC, Goose Pinpin, Sogou Search, Myya App, Penguin E-sports, Tencent WiFi Housekeeper, Magic Core, VUE, Stadia, Spotlight Express, etc.
It can be seen that no matter how classic a product is, it cannot escape the market rule of survival of the fittest. Under the cruel competition, who will be the next tear of the times?
To sum up, there is still one day before 2022 will officially end. In this year, we witnessed the vicissitudes of life, experienced the ups and downs, saw off familiar people and things, witnessed the collapse of the old pattern, and experienced the breeding of the new order.
Now, we will officially enter the post epidemic era. Although we are still struggling in the dense fog, sometimes we can see the end of the day through the clouds. I believe that one day, we will keep the clouds open to see the moon.
Many years later, when looking back at 2022, we may sigh: that year is the dividing line of the times.
