What's in a name? For FireWire, plenty. What Apple traditionally sold under the FireWire trademark has also been pitched as i.Link and IEEE 1394, but fresh competition is forcing the company to rethink its marketing. [CNET News.com]

A couple years ago now I was had lunch with a team of engineers from a company that specialized in Digital Video gear. I asked them which would be better for home video editing, USB 2.0 or FireWire.

The answer was FireWire, because at the time, USB 2.0 was all talk no action. Once 2.0 came out though, it was all a matter of adoption. If manufacturers got behind USB, FireWire, being proprietary, would be out of luck. Apple's move of letting a board control this is a huge step in getting this into more and more devices. The next step will be shrinking the chipset, so that much like voice control, it can become ubiquitous.

Imagine using one cable, let me emphasisze that, ONE CABLE to connect all your devices. No more custom cables for every device, just one loose end you hae dangling from your PC so that you can sync your PDA, sync your phone, upload music/sites/news whatever to your devices. If FireWire wants to do this, they need to push it as a standard and get it into as many devices as possible, really going after the marketshare that USB has built up.

9:43:08 AM