To say that 2020 unfolded in unexpected ways would be an epic understatement. The changes caused by the pandemic promise to impact tech, business and everything else for years to come. And that's just the start.

The influence of Seattle's tech and scientific communities rippled throughout the world. The region's life sciences institutions played a key role in uncovering and battling COVID-19, and Bill Gates emerged as a leading voice for science and equity in the pandemic. Enterprise tech companies provided the bedrock for a massive global acceleration of digital technologies.

A national reckoning over race, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, brought renewed attention to the tech industry's diversity and inclusion problems, and fueled what will hopefully become lasting momentum to address them. 

MacKenzie Scott’s bold approach to philanthropy set an example for her fellow billionaires, as she took extraordinary steps to distribute her Amazon wealth.

As if 2020 wasn't eventful enough, the tech industry and U.S. government grappled with an unprecedented cyberattack in the final weeks of the year in the form of the SolarWinds hack, threatening to undermine key institutions and organizations, and prompting an extraordinary response from Microsoft.

We reflect on this unprecedented year on a new episode of the GeekWire Podcast, as viewed through our focus on technology, business and innovation in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Joining GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop for the discussion is guest commentator Ed Lazowska, computer science professor at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

To inform our discussion, we each reviewed lists of top stories on GeekWire for the full year and each month, as determined by overall readership, then offered our own perspectives on the trends, stories and issues that mattered most.

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