Every year I look back at all of the Products of the Week I've selected during the year and pick the one that made the most significant impression on me to crown the Product of the Year. This year the election and pandemic kept our lives pretty messed up, and to keep working we relied heavily on our laptops, cloud services, networking gear, and our collaboration apps. We also needed entertainment to stay sane, and whether it was HBO Max, Netflix, or Amazon Prime, we found our release in online entertainment. Let's look at my top 13 contenders, and then I'll rank the top four products as we work toward the 2020 Product of the Year. So here we go, in no particular order.

Cisco Webex Desk Hub

I started in tech working for IBM's telecommunications division, and for a time, I was the Competitive Analyst over desktop phones. This effort was back in the 1980s. We had created phones that went beyond voice to include critical information on who was calling, both text and voice messaging, and the merger of electronic text and voice messaging.

Since then, I've wanted many of these features, yet office phones were outstripped by smartphones in terms of functions and languished. That was until this year when Cisco rethought the desk phone with its Webex Desk Hub.

Montblanc Summit 2+ 4G Smartwatch

There has been the Apple Watch and little else, other than exercise focused products like the Fitbit, that could provide similar functionality for some time. The Montblanc Summit 2+ smartwatch was the first Qualcomm-based Android platform watch to give the Apple Watch a run for its money.

4th Generation Echo

The Amazon Echo still is the product to beat when it comes to a home digital assistant, and during this pandemic, for way too many of us, the Echo was our only home companion. This 4th Generation Echo improved sound quality, particularly at the low end, became a lot less expensive, and it's a vast improvement over the 3rd generation offering.