I'm not the only one to take issue with Christopher Mims' pessimistic view of 2013; Om Malik takes it up here:

The latest such example is a piece in Quartz, a sister publication of The Atlantic. This article, under the headline 2013 was a lost year for tech bemoans Silicon Valley and all its failures, has turned intellectual trolling into high art. It is fairly easy to focus on the lack of whiz-bang technologies like the iPhone or the Kindle. It is pretty easy to focus on the tech-NSA nexus, which I agree is deplorable. And it is also very easy to focus on what some think of as pointless apps.

"Intellectual trolling" indeed.