Best Products of 2000

Quick, what's the national pastime?

We say baseball still gets the nod, but computing is closing in. Both PCs and the Web are national obsessions these days, at home and at work. And just as baseball fans vote for the best of the best to play in the All-Star Game, PC World editors have been casting ballots to select the winners of our 18th annual World Class Awards. Over 70 outstanding hardware, software, and Web products make the cut--call them the buys of summer.

As always, performance, value, consistency, and innovation are the four qualities we seek in a World Class winner. Some products here are standouts in a couple of these areas, but the Product of the Year--AMD's Athlon processor--is a superstar in all four. Athlon-based PCs sprinted to the top of our corporate and home PC charts this year, touting record-breaking performance and affordable prices. And AMD's chip was the first to hit a clock speed of 1 gigahertz, beating Intel at its own game.

Our all-star lineup includes rookies (such as Adobe's InDesign, Handspring's Visor Deluxe, and Microsoft's IntelliMouse Optical) and veterans (including Adobe Photoshop, Dell's Dimension PCs, and Microsoft Office). New award categories this year for designer PCs, gadgets, and MP3 players reflect the move toward stylish, fun, and funky computing devices.

Another emerging trend: Web-based services are rapidly encroaching on the turf of desktop applications. Our top groupware product is the browser-based HotOffice, and we've added categories for Best Web Service (EFax) and Best Free E-Mail (Yahoo Mail). We're not saying that you'll never again have to trek to a computer store to purchase shrink-wrapped software. But a year from now, it could be a whole new ballgame.

Not every award winner here is...well, a winner. Y2K doomsayers, we're relieved to report, are our Losers of the Year (guess they'll have to save those candles and canned goods for the next millennium). Though the Y2K crowd edged out Microsoft for this award, the software giant has been declared a monopoly, and its fate will be decided by legal battles that could drag on for years. And in "Hits & Misses," we take a poke at the most irritating vendors, trends, and events of the past year.

But enough pregame show. Welcome to year 18 of the World Class Awards, PC fans. Play ball!