(Image Source: EHS Technologies)

BY JJ BAILEY

ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN

2011 was a year of big ups and BIG downs in the tech world.
First, the downs.
Several companies took big hits, but perhaps no two companies stumbled harder than RIM and Netflix.
Already trailing in the smartphone race-- and following a letter than talked of unrest in company management going public, a massive outage in October led to the company giving away free apps.

“Research in Motion is giving away $100 worth of app downloads to customers to say sorry for last week’s service outages. Starting Wednesday, free apps will be rolled out over four weeks and will be available for download until the end of the year.”

Then came a stock downgrade. But the biggest kicker came right after, when two RIM execs were so drunk on a commercial flight that the plane had to be re-routed across the Pacific just to get rid of them.
So where does the ailing company sit now?

“RIM? Hahaha, a number of analysts have come out today with sell or downgrading their estimates on the stock. They’re cutting their price targets, all sorts of things, stocks getting hit again...”

Well, better luck next year.
Now, if you wanna talk up and down, how about Netflix?

The company went from $175 per share in January, to almost $300 in July, alllll the way down to $67 a share in December.

Why? Let’s count the ways.... Doubling prices, losing 850 thousand customers in Q3 and Reed Hastings blogging about it didn’t help. Or it could be the creation of what may be the biggest biz joke of the year:  Qwikster.

Enough of the bad. 2011 saw some major successes too, perhaps the biggest of which belonged to Google’s Android OS.

According to ComScore’s latest survey, Android now owns nearly half of the platform market in the U.S., coming in at just over 46%. And in the global market? By October, they were already running away with it.

“The Android operating system is now on almost half of all cell phones around the world.  Mountain view based Google owns Android.  A high tech market analyst says Android now has a market share of 48%.  Cupertino’s Apple has a market share of 19%.

One in ten smartphone users may use an iPhone, but the upstart OS from Google has taken the world by storm.

But forget smartphones-- 2011 was the year of the tablet.

March 11 saw the release of the iPad 2, which shattered its predecessor’s sales records and sold out nation wide within hours, notching almost a million units sold in its first weekend.

A parade of competing products followed. The Nook, the PlayBook, the HP TouchPad ... dozens of tablets hit the market from non-Apple vendors. None really came close to challenging the Cuppertino juggernaut …. until November 15.

“Just days after Amazon’s Kindle Fire was announced analyst said it wouldn’t sell more than 2.5 million units. Now CNET places those expectations as high as 6 million units by the end of the fourth quarter.”

While Amazon appears to have struck gold with the Kindle Fire- smaller players tried to make a name for themselves as IPO-mania hit the tech industry. Some--were big winners.

“Well this weeks initial public offering for LinkedIn has everybody talking, shares closed at 94 bucks.”

Others didn’t do so hot.

“20.03, as low as that stock traded today. Still, a lot of questions here. Groupon loses money, there are many questions about the business model, zero barriers to entry in terms of the competition, LivingSocial coming on strong, you have the likes of Google and others getting into this space. So investors seem to keep questioning the revenue growth prospects for this company.”

But still to come-- what could be the biggest tech player to go public since Google.

“Facebook is looking to raise about $10 billion and could value the company at about $100 billion. They could file-- they’re still discussing the exact timing-- they could file before the end of this year, even, for an IPO that would be, as you said, in the second quarter of next year.”

Finally -- the biggest tech story of 2011 -- the passing of industry icon Steve Jobs. On October 5, the Apple CEO died after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56.

“Steve Jobs led this company from really a floundering organization into one of the most powerful companies in all the world. He took Apple to a company through which millions and really hundreds of millions of people communicate.”

KNBC
“Jobs stared lovingly at his wife and children for a long time and then he seemed to look past them and repeated three times: ‘Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.’”

Thanks for sticking with Newsy for all your top tech headlines in 2011-- we’ll keep ‘em coming in 2012.