Tech Buzz

If the Chinese government isn't careful, its forthcoming Beijing Olympics could rival the 1936 and 1968 Summer Games for infamy and a message that ultimately backfires on the host country. That warning comes from human rights groups and Internet free speech advocacy organizations following news this...

The British House of Lords has decided to extradite Gary McKinnon, a British citizen who hacked his way into several U.S. military, defense and NASA computers, to the United States to stand trial. McKinnon has been fighting extradition since the discovery in 2002 that he was the one who broke into t...

The iPhone 3G's battery life and problems with MobileMe have many favoring the older model, but lines are still forming for the 3G version. This showcases both the amazing capabilities of brilliant marketing and the risks associated with applying it to the wrong product. At the core of the iPhone's ...

I like writing about conflict because it gives you more than one dimension to a story, and there were two interesting conflicts that I ran into last week. The first, more near-term, will likely define the direction of the notebook market, and it is important because it implies an ether/or decision w...

Sometimes it's the little things that can cause you to step back and rethink how you look at a company. For much of this decade, Microsoft has been the "evil empire" with Apple, Linux and Google on the side of the Force. With Microsoft actually doing some positive creative things for once, Apple's d...

There are many things to admire about Apple, but like every company it has a dark side. One of the things I personally find more than annoying is the Apple fan base that will attack you if you honestly don't want to buy an Apple product and talk about your choice. But the thing to be concerned about...

A lot of us are focused on Microsoft and Bill Gates this month as Bill's last day at the company he founded and ran to dominance passed last Friday. I've met Bill several times but only really once spoken to him. From a personal aspect, he has mostly been cordial, and he once personally came to my r...

Last week I was in Japan doing a deep dive on Panasonic, a firm I've observed for decades but never really got to know until recently. I've studied Apple in depth since the '80s and I find the contrasts between the firms and their key founders Konosuke Matsushita -- for whom Panasonic was originally...

I started off the week with dueling events: the Apple WWDC, where they talked about Snow Leopard and the second generation iPhone, HP's massive product announcement, and Microsoft's TechEd, where I learned more about Unlimited Vista. I was taken by the fact that Apple missed with the iPhone with the...

Last week was Computex, but today everyone is focused on the likely launch of the iPhone. Given that some of the announcements at the show will have an impact on the future of devices like this, and that some of you will likely want to read something while standing in line, let's look at Computex vs...