ID card exclusive, Steve Jobs win, top CIOs and BT fibre plans
2009's stories of the year
As 2009 draws to a close, it's time for silicon.com's annual look back at the most popular stories of the year.
A tech giant experiencing a change of leadership was Redmond's arch-rival, Apple. With Steve Jobs taking a medical leave of absence earlier this year, readers were clamouring to find out which execs would be stepping into the fray to replace the Mac maker's CEO.
Crystal-ball gazing from Seb Janacek also proved popular this year as the silicon.com columnist looked through the iPhone 3.0 code to sniff out clues to Apple's future roadmap.
Not so popular, however, are Macs among the CIO community: an article entitled why CIOs are saying no to Macs, which polled the CIO Jury on the Mac vs PC debate found the majority of CIOs still shunning Macs, blaming it on cost. None of the IT chiefs surveyed said the latest iteration of the Mac OS - Snow Leopard - will push their company to adopt Apple desktops.
While the business community may have a lukewarm reaction to Apple kit, it's quite the opposite when it comes to the company's CEO: Steve Jobs was named as the most influential individual in technology in silicon.com's annual Agenda Setters poll.
It wasn't just heads of tech vendors getting the plaudits, however: Catherine Doran was voted the UK's most influential technology leader in silicon.com's CIO50, shaped by the UK's top business and technology executives voting for their CIO peers on the basis of their performance during the last year.
Those looking to follow in Doran's footsteps and scale the heady heights of IT leadership should take a read of another popular article from this year: 10 ways to make your boss love you.
Another reader favourite from February this year was a silicon.com exclusive around the controversial government ID card scheme, which unearthed the fact that while the first ID cards had been issued, no card readers had been made available to police stations, job centres or border entry points - meaning the information held on the cards' microchips was essentially unreadable.
Another tech rollout drawing readers' attention this year was BT's plans to extend fibre broadband connectivity to 10 million UK homes by 2012. This year saw the telco naming the first batches of towns that will see their exchanges get fibre, including Chelmsford, London, Manchester and Edinburgh: you can see the full list of towns here.
And finally from fixed communications to a world without wires: if you don't know your Zigbee from your 802.11n, check out silicon.com's A to Z of wireless.