It’s that happy time of year for making predictions for next year and beyond, an exercise that seems more pointless than usual when it comes to tech.

Prognostications inevitably prove inaccurate and looking back at those made 12 months ago, we could not have been more wide of the mark. No one was predicting a pandemic that would propel us at warp speed towards a working from home culture and a wholesale digital transformation of our lives.

Then, added to those supremely unreliable forecasts is the fact that we know the future already. Kind of. Back in April, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft had seen two years of digital transformation in two months. So in tech’s continuum, we were in 2022 by last Spring and must have reached 2025 at least by now.

But if the future is already here, as William Gibson said, it is still not very evenly distributed. I can personally take you back a few years in a time machine, if I tell you our house in central London was struggling on 3 megabits per second broadband as recently as last month. It has now been catapulted into the present day by finally being connected to fibre at near gigabit speeds.

There is certitude about what connectivity can do, now and in the future. It changes everything, and the faster it gets, the faster changes happen. So I confidently predict the fibre being laid, the 5G masts being raised and the constellations of satellites being sent up into orbit next year will bring the biggest changes, digitally enfranchising millions around the world and enhancing the digital worlds of those of lucky enough to already have lightning-fast broadband.

More on that below in #techFT’s look back at 2020’s big themes and tentative look forward to 2021. We’ll be back on January 4 with what’s really happening in tech. Stay safe till then.

The Internet of (2020) Things

Primed for the pandemic
Zoom is one of our top Year in a Word selections for 2020 as the video conferencing company joined Google in becoming a verb. Its market cap also zoomed in value when it became the big winner as the working from home wave hit. Founder Eric Yuan’s worth grew from $4bn to $18bn. Most popular phrase of the year?: “You’re on mute!”.

Big Tech gets bigger
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook had added more than $12tn to their combined market caps by November, as investors saw Big Tech riding out the coronavirus crisis better than anyone else. The material risk going into 2021 is the big target on their backs as politicians and regulators look to rein in their powers on both sides of the Atlantic. China is also on the case with its giants — Alibaba came under antitrust investigation today. Silicon Valley may also be losing some of its influence, with Oracle, HPE and even Elon Musk moving to Texas.

Streaming success . . . and failure
With everyone stuck on the sofa in self-isolation in 2020, Netflix expects to have passed 200m subscribers globally by the end of this year and its closest rival Disney expects its Plus service to triple in size to around 250m users by 2024. If they have been the biggest winners in the streaming wars this year, Quibi was the biggest loser — the mobile “quick bites” video service said in October it was shutting down after only six months and blamed people’s lack of mobility in the pandemic. Cinema chains were the other big losers, with studios like Warner Bros and Disney choosing to stream key releases. The Christmas blockbuster battle between Warner’s Wonder Woman 1984 and Disney’s Soul when they are released on Friday will be fought out on HBO Max and Disney Plus, not at the local picture house.

Networks failed to lock down against hackers
Hackers had more time on their hands in 2020 and exploited consumers spending more time online mercilessly, with scams and ransomware. State-sponsored hacking also escalated, culminating this month with the Covid vaccine supply chain being targeted and Russia being blamed for the SolarWinds hack that penetrated US government networks.

An electrifying year for cars
Last Friday, Tesla became the largest ever stock to enter the S&P 500 index, capping a year where it reached a stock market valuation of $600bn, making it worth as much as the eight largest legacy manufacturers. Could Apple turn out to be its biggest rival, with plans reported this week for an electric “iCar” by 2024? Nikola, the electric truck group, was targeted by a short seller who cast doubt on its innovations. Uber this month gave up on its plans to develop a self-driving car, but Zoox, bought by Amazon in June for $1.2bn, has just unveiled its robotaxi, which has no steering wheel and can drive day and night on a single charge.

Tech IPOs triumph in adversity
Despite a year of uncertainty, 65 tech companies went public in 2020, creating uneasy comparisons with the dotcom boom. Cloud company Snowflake and food delivery service DoorDash both fared well, but Airbnb was the star, with the holiday rentals service seeing its stock more than double on its first day of trading this month.

TikTok takes over from Huawei
Telecoms networks and semiconductors are more serious areas of concern as the US balances trade and national security concerns in its dealings with China, but Huawei and SMIC were eclipsed by dance video app TikTok, with the White House wanting it sold or shut down. This September story on its banning from US app stores was our most-read story in tech in 2020.

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Three big FT tech scoops
Wirecard was the corporate fraud of the decade. The company’s leadership lied about its business and about €1.9bn in missing cash. Its collapse leaves uncomfortable questions for regulators, auditors and others who were supposed to protect investors’ money. We also unmasked SoftBank as the “Nasdaq whale” whose trading stoked a rally in big tech stocks. Our reporters spoke to top investors baffled by founder Masayoshi Son’s unconventional strategy. Tim Bradshaw and Patrick McGee uncovered an Apple exclusive that was hiding in plain sight: its efforts to develop an alternative to Google’s search.

A year of vaccine and AI breakthroughs
Science trumped all of tech’s achievements in 2020, with the creation, production and distribution of safe vaccines in record time, but tech is becoming intertwined with advancements. UK AI company DeepMind announced it could predict the structure of proteins, a breakthrough that could dramatically speed up the discovery of new drugs. GPT-3, a new language-generation model, also caused a sensation in the AI world with its resemblance to human intelligence.

The Internet of (2021) Things

The connectivity singularity is coming
Bailed out by the UK government, OneWeb resumed launches this month of satellites that are part of its plan to put 650 into orbit and create a global broadband network by 2022. SpaceX is in a “Better than Nothing Beta” in the US with its satellite service, with global coverage promised in 2021. Full-fibre and 5G coverage is spreading rapidly and AST SpaceMobile, working with Vodafone promises connectivity from space for 1.6bn people in equatorial regions in 2023. This could revolutionise business, education and commerce in emerging markets. Oh, and Nokia is installing a 4G network on the moon.

Video conferencing-as-a-platform
Advances in our remote video services will go beyond more bells and whistles and emojis in 2021. Zoom is already seeing itself as a platform and is reporting to be looking to add calendar and email services. Microsoft has just added the “Together Mode” option to Skype, breaking down the grid view so everyone can feel they are in the same room, coffee shop or other venue.

Streaming will be a games battlefield
While video services have been the focus this year, the winners and losers in gaming’s streaming wars may start to emerge in 2021. Facebook Gaming is promising a more sophisticated platform to compete with Google’s Stadia and Microsoft’s xCloud. In addition, Apple is planning an upgraded Apple TV in 2021 with a stronger gaming focus, an updated remote and a new processor, reports Bloomberg.

Physical retail’s last stand
Shops and malls may need to hasten their reinvention once we are all able to roam freely again. Once a mini-boom for shopping in the real world fades, analysts expect the shift to online to continue more rapidly. UBS has upped its estimate of online’s share of US retail from 20.5 per cent by 2024 to 31 per cent, up from just 14 per cent in 2019.

A deal yet to be done
Nvidia’s $40bn acquisition of Arm shook the semiconductor industry this year as the neutrality of its key supplier of chip designs was threatened. But it may very well not happen. US approval will probably be forthcoming, but the UK, EU and China may come up with insurmountable objections and they will be lobbied hard by Nvidia’s rivals.

IPOs to come
There will be fewer big tech IPOs in 2021, but those set to make their debut are not without interest. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, will lead the way, with games platform Roblox, scooter service Lime and trading app Robinhood looking to be next in line. Payments service Stripe is the joker in the pack.

Best of 2020 Tech Tools

Gamers got the best gadgets of 2020, with not one but two next-generation consoles released in the shape of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X and Oculus coming up with a big advance in VR headsets with the Quest 2. Notable smartphone releases were the iPhone 12, Microsoft’s pricey dual-screen Surface Duo and Samsung’s folding-screen Galaxy Z Fold 2. Apple set new laptop standards for battery life and performance with its M1-powered MacBooks and produced some amazing over-ear headphones in the AirPods Max. Finally, Samsung made a bold attempt to reinvent TV for the smartphone age with the swivelling Sero.