10 most important tech trends of the decade

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the iPad on January 27, 2010, in San Francisco. When I hustled out of CNET headquarters in San Francisco on May 26, 2010, and slipped into a rental car with two of my co-workers to head to a meeting across the Bay, one of them slipped me a copy of The Wall Street Journal and pointed to a headline that announced Apple had passed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable tech company. "What do you think of that?" she said. "Unreal," I responded, shaking my head. Just over a decade earlier, Apple had nearly been on its deathbed and needed a $150 million investment from Microsoft simply to stay alive. But then the iPhone arrived in 2007, and Apple rewrote the playbook on the mobile revolution.