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The Yearly Round-Up 2006
"There's no one quite like Grandma..."

By silicon.com

Published: Thursday 21 December 2006

Among the many traditions and institutions of Christmas is one which, like a Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special, unites and divides generations.

Paul McCartney had five, The Beatles had four, Band Aid, Cliff Richard and the Spice Girls each had three, Queen had two, Mr Blobby, Bob the Builder and Robbie Williams had one but Take That has never had one... yet.

We are of course talking Christmas number ones and the annual British fascination with this piece of largely pointless pop trivia.

Entering into the spirit of things the Round-Up's yearly run down will now take you on a trip down memory lane, via some of the most popular Christmas number-one hits from yesteryear.

Why? Because it's surprising you see, as the silicon.com editorial team plays its CD of Christmas number ones, just how many (shoe-horn at the ready) put us in mind of major happenings in the world of technology this year.

See how many you can remember...

For starters, passengers passing through a number of international airports this year may well have been put in mind of 1959's Christmas number one (which the Round-Up is sure you know was "What Do You Wanna Make Those Eyes At Me For" by Emile Ford and the Checkmates...) as they proffered up their eyeballs for iris recognition.

Or winding the clock forward three years Christmas number one in 1962 was "Return to Sender" by Elvis Presley... and wouldn't we all love to return the still-increasing amounts of spam back to the crooks who are sending it out?

Seven years on from Elvis' first and only UK Christmas number one came a hauntingly beautiful tale of brotherly love as Rolf Harris topped the charts with "Two Little Boys".

And do you think Sergei Brin would leave Larry Page crying when there's room on his $150bn horse for two?

Not a bit of it. And the pair's all-conquering venture - called Google, which, unlike Emile Ford and the Checkmates, you may actually have heard of - has certainly had a barnstorming year once again.

The world went crazy for Google Earth and many enterprise users who had previously known Google only for internet search began to show some interest in the notion that there may yet be a company able to come between Microsoft and its unholy monopoly.

Google is currently ramping up its enterprise software offering with spreadsheets (woo-hoo!), word processing (right on!) and even a hosted mail offering (shazzam!).

It doesn't get more exciting than that.

Unless of course you count the $1.6bn acquisition of YouTube.

Onto 1971 and a song about the computer used by the government's Premium Bonds system. No, really.

OK, the Round-Up knows the "Ernie" in Benny Hill's song of the same name was actually the proud owner of the fastest milk float in the west, rather than Ernie (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment) which decides which premium bond owners are 'quids in' each month.

However, the latter had reason to celebrate this year when he turned 50... though from the pictures silicon.com published of the birthday boy we're sure you'll agree he doesn't look a day over 75.

Three years on from Benny 'big in the USA' Hill and Mud were "Lonely this Christmas" with one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing Christmas songs since "Little Donkey" was taken out into the paddock and shot, in a little-known follow-up to the nursery school favourite.

"It'll be lonely this Christmas,
Without you to hold,
It'll be lonely this Christmas,
Lonely and cold," sang Mud.

The Round-Up can't help thinking the subject of the writer's affections probably left him for a man with central heating. Nobody wants to be cold at Christmas.

But it won't just be over-sentimental glam rockers who are lonely this Christmas. The very pseudonym of the computer hacker 'Solo' - better known as Gary McKinnon - suggests he is something of a lone ranger and McKinnon may well feel he is lacking some very necessary 'friends in high places' as he awaits extradition to the US to stand trial for hacking into US military and Nasa computers.

McKinnon jumped from niche tech press headlines to the mainstream media in early 2006 when he went public about his reasons, motives and findings from a trawl of secret US military computers.

He was, of course, looking for proof of alien life - and by Jove he only went and found it.

McKinnon told the press: "I found a list of officers' names, under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'."

Spooky.

"I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers' and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."

You may remember this from the time - a lone British hacker finally finding incontrovertible evidence of US collusion in an alien conspiracy theory does tend to stick in the mind.

And what more can he tell us of this set-up, worthy of the X-Files? Not much, it transpires, because, by his own admission, McKinnon was "smoking a lot of dope at the time" and can't remember the exact details.

So close and yet so stupid.

While few people have come to McKinnon's defence regarding serving jail time 'somewhere' if found guilty of these openly admitted offences, the willingness on the part of the UK to hand McKinnon over to the US has caused some outrage - especially as the extradition agreement governing the process is not reciprocal.

As one US reader, called Todd, pointed out: "We own you guys. Now settle down while we take your citizen away to be tortured, please.

"I think it's funny how badly we own you but I also think it's funny how easily you'd cough up one of your own citizens without a fight. What a sad country you guys are. No offense."

However, Todd, the Round-Up is pretty sure the joke is actually on you... look readers, he can't even spell 'offence'.

Somebody else who may be experiencing his last Christmas as a free man for quite some time is Sanjay Kumar, former CEO of Computer Associates (as was).

Kumar has been sentenced to 12 (yes TWELVE) years in prison for his part in the accounting scandal at CA and will be reporting to prison in February to begin his sentence - assuming he hasn't done what the Round-Up would do upon being told to report to prison several months down the line, which would be to pack a bag full of disguises (mainly beards, glasses and hats) and disappear south of the border.

Of course, one of the filings to come out of CA around the time of its SEC investigation reported a practice known as a '35 day month' which is a way of artificially booking licensing revenues (though you don't need to know the maths).

But it does make the Round-Up wonder whether Kumar has grown accustomed to getting five extra pieces of chocolate in his advent calendar.

Another former high-tech CEO also started his own prison sentence earlier this year. In September, disgraced former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers reported to a Louisiana prison to begin his sentence which could see him feeling pretty lonely for the next 25 Christmases.

Onto 1980, when the St Winifred's School Choir belted out rock anthem "There's no one quite like Grandma" to secure the number-one spot.

"There's no one quite like Grandma
A love we always share
At party time and Christmas too
We know that she'll be there," sang the gat-toothed youths.

Of course, remember one thing - that one young girl's Grandma is another put-upon-parent's mother-in-law and "we know that she'll be there" suddenly becomes a far more depressing prediction for the outlook over Christmas.

Still, "We've got his bloody mother staying with us again this year" probably wouldn't have made for such a feel-good number one.

And it's also wrong in this day and age to stereotype the elderly as kindly white-haired old dears for whom reading a bedtime story, and being good at cuddles, is the height of achievement. 2006 even saw the launch of Silver Surfer Week to showcase the fact that the elderly have got this whole internet thing licked - while pushing for initiatives to get even more old folks online.

Of course, if "There's no-one quite like Grandma" was a step backwards in credibility terms for the music industry, come the nineties the industry hurled itself into the abyss marked 'musical void' to crown Mr Blobby its man in 1993.

In comparison the tech industry's very own Mr Blobby had a quiet year.

And in case you're in any doubt who that might be... here's a clip of Mr Blobby on the BBC, making a respected institution look like a joke-shop by crashing around the stage like a bumbling witless oaf.

And then, here's this ever popular clip...

That's right, it's Steve Ballmer doing for Microsoft's credibility what Mr Blobby did for the BBC's and to prove he hasn't lost any of his charm or finesse here's Ballmer delivering a speech this year about Microsoft's transitions through the ages.

Of course the big news out of Microsoft this year (apart from the launch of Vista, which we'll come to a little later) was the announced departure of chairman, founder and chief software architect Bill Gates.

Gates will be stepping down to spend more time with his billions - specifically with the intention of putting them to good use in the developing world. An ambition he of course shares with the cast of Band Aid, Band Aid II and Band Aid III who somehow managed a hat-trick of Christmas number ones with "Do they know it's Christmas" in 1984, 1989 and 1994.

(It's not just puzzling over the developing world's grasp on the whole Christmas thing which has a tendency to re-iterate every few years... this year saw the internet do it, appearing on the scene as web 2.0)

However, anybody within Microsoft who is fearful of life after Bill Gates, might be put in mind of 1994's (how on earth did this become a) Christmas number one - "Stay another day" by East 17. (Seriously, we checked numerous sites and it seems this bunch really did have a Christmas number one).

And from an easily forgotten boy band to an all-conquering girl band.

In 1996 the Spice Girls - the greedy little madams - had the first of three consecutive Christmas number ones with "2 become 1" which could as easily be a song about the sheer number of tech mergers during 2006 as it is about making whoopee.

Google and YouTube, Alcatel and Lucent, HP and Mercury, RSA and EMC, Virgin Mobile and NTL:Telewest, Brocade and McData, AMD and ATI, AT&T and Bell South... the list goes on, with companies coupling up quicker in 2006 than hormone-addled teens at a school disco.

The honour of having the Christmas number one was finally wrestled off the Spice Girls in 1999 by Westlife (of all people) with a cover version of "Seasons in the Sun".

"We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun," sang Westlife in a song which really knocked Mud into a cocked hat in terms of moribund sentiment.

But as the Round-Up tried to think who enjoyed a season in the sun this year it realised there was only one possible winner - man of the year Guy Goma, who was a star for a week after a mistake at the BBC saw him put in front of camera on live television.

Goma was actually at the Beeb for a job interview and the studio were expecting one Guy Kewney to do a talking head slot on BBC News 24... one hilarious mix-up later and the wrong Guy was in front of camera talking about Apple and iPods.

Here's the clip in all its beauty... the Round-Up is still reduced to tears by Guy Goma's face five seconds in when he realises he is most likely sat in the wrong seat.

It speaks for itself.

Goma subsequently went on to boss the global media mainstream for a week while Guy Kewney, well, clearly didn't. He must have been left feeling very much like the Christmas number one of 1981 ("Don't you want me" by The Human League).

Moving on to Christmas 2000, and another novelty record.

If ever the restorative powers of Bob the Builder (can he fix it? Yes he can) were called for it was during 2006 when pretty much anything that could go wrong did go wrong for Sony, especially where laptop batteries - and the not-inconsiderable problem of them exploding - was concerned.

First it was a Dell laptop which went up in flames at a conference and then a couple of other reports started to trickle through of overheating laptops... cue one of the largest product recalls of all time, not to mention scares and subsequent bans where taking these 'exploding laptops' onto aeroplanes was concerned.

Also doing a little builder-like fixing of their own were the good folk over at Microsoft who not only - finally - got around to releasing a new Windows operating system this year, they even decided to make this one secure.

Whatever next.

And finally, it wouldn't be a year in tech without some people making some truly stupid comments - putting the Round-Up in mind of Christmas 2001 when Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman (really? The actress?) had a hit with the Sinatra family favourite "Something Stupid".

"And then you go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like...

"The internet is not a big truck... it's a series of tubes."

This was the take of Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican politician, who this year publicly displayed an impressive level of ignorance when confusing viewers and colleagues with his take on the biggest problems facing the internet.

Stevens managed to speak for 10 minutes without saying anything of any worth or value (beyond the comedic).

"Those tubes can be filled and they're filled when you put your message in it, it gets in line, it's gonna be delayed by anyone who puts into that tube enormous amounts of material," explained Stevens to baffled on-lookers who previously might have - wrongly, it transpired - assumed they understood what the internet was.

"I just the other day got an internet sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday," said Stevens.

"What?" said everybody else.

For the record, Senator Ted Stevens is the head of the senate commerce committee that regulates ecommerce.

So rest easy, the internet is in safe hands.

And one last thing: don't forget to take part in the latest Caption Competition which will last for two weeks - so you have plenty of time to think up a witty one-liner.