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The 13 biggest tech shockers of 2015
Just three weeks into 2015, Microsoft made the surprise announcement that it was skipping Windows 9 and going straight to Windows 10 — and that the new operating system would be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8 users.
In February, the FCC voted to regulate the internet as a public utility under Title II, supporting the important concept of net neutrality.
When Amazon announced its "Dash" buttons on March 31, everyone assumed it was an early April Fools' Day joke. But it's a very real way to literally order products with the push of a button.
April 2015 saw the release of the long-rumored, long-awaited, much-hyped Apple Watch. But after some quietly brutal reviews, the Apple Watch failed to make a serious dent, surprising Apple's fans and analysts alike.
Apple announced in June that it would be making its Swift programming language open source, meaning any programmer could download it and modify it to their heart's content. It was a surprisingly big step for such a famously private company. In early December, Apple followed through.
Ellen Pao had a two-fer in 2015: In March, Pao lost her high-profile gender-discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, top-tier tech investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. And in July, she stepped down from her role as the interim CEO of Reddit, following a user revolt against the firing of a popular employee of the link-sharing site.
The tech world exploded in August when Google announced a total corporate reorganization of the company and the creation of its new parent company, Alphabet.
In August, The New York Times dropped a bomb on Amazon with a report indicating that the e-retail giant is a pretty lousy place to work. The company publicly denied The Times' report, but the shock waves were tremendous.
An update to Apple's iOS mobile operating system in September caused a panic in the media and advertising industries by letting users install ad-blocking software on their iPhones and iPads. It didn't help that those ad blockers shot up the sales charts when they were first released.
In September, Apple announced the iPad Pro, a gigantic tablet/laptop hybrid. But the really shocking part was the introduction of the $99 Apple Pencil stylus — a concept that Steve Jobs famously hated.
In October, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped a bomb: Thousands of Tesla Model S owners found that an overnight software update turned the high-end vehicle into a (mostly) self-driving car.
The $9 billion blood-testing startup Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, found themselves at the center of a huge controversy after an October report in The Wall Street Journal raised serious concerns over the effectiveness of its "revolutionary" technology.
In December, Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan announced the birth of their daughter, Max Zuckerberg, which was news enough. But the news carried the additional stunner that Zuckerberg plans to donate 99% of his shares in Facebook to the newly created Chan Zuckerberg Initiative over the course of his lifetime. Those shares are worth $45 billion today.
On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.
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