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Separated at birth: Microsoft Kinect and Sony Kinetic?

If you're like me and were wondering why Kinect sounded slightly familiar when Microsoft announced the name for its new motion-sensing game technology/platform, it's because about five years ago Sony put out a PS2 EyeToy game called Kinetic. No, the two words aren't the same, but only one letter is different, which has a few bloggers wondering whether Sony will put up a stink about it.

We assume that someone at Microsoft's crack legal team vetted the name properly, but it all seems a little odd considering Microsoft Kinect seems to share a lot in more

Memo to Microsoft: Get a new brand for mobile

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a new job: overseeing the company's entertainment and mobile businesses in the wake of high-profile executive departures. It's not the first time Ballmer has taken the reins of struggling business units, having managed the Windows and Internet search businesses directly at different times, but arguably Microsoft doesn't need new management.

It needs new brands. Especially in mobile.

Microsoft has sought to extend its Windows brand to a diverse array of technology, from SharePoint to Windows Phone. Windows is a powerful brand. But it's also a brand that screams "20th century."

And more

Google vs. Apple in the battle of the fanboys

Something strange happened last week at Google I/O, Google's big developer event. Google may have attained cult status. There was an energy in the halls normally reserved for Apple events like WWDC, as 5,000 attendees chattered about Google TV, Android, WebM, and more.

Google is ascendant, and it may take the fanboys with it.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs may believe there's "not a chance" that Google is leapfrogging Apple, and assures the faithful that "[they] won't be disappointed" at WWDC, but worrisome signs abound for the iconic technology company.

The media, for one thing, is

Mozilla's Firefox was born during a time when Microsoft's Internet Explorer had grown so fat and lazy that hacking off a massive chunk of its market share was almost a moral duty, one with a built-in fan club. "Anything but IE" was the mantra for some, and Mozilla delivered with aplomb.

That was then, this is now, and "now" is bound to be much, much harder.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes correctly notes that "the five years ahead of Mozilla will be far tougher than the five years that's behind the company." The reason? Mozilla is no longer the white

Fragmenting Linux is not the way to beat Apple

In an attempt to copycat Apple's hardware-plus-software vertical approach to the mobile market, the Linux industry is fragmenting fast and risks undermining its best chance for beating the iPhone.

The mobile Linux market has always had more variants/distributions than sense, ranging from Google Android to LiMo to Moblin (now MeeGo) to Bada to WebOS to...you name it. Whereas Linux has been a rallying force in the enterprise server market, with diverse competitors and partners collaborating on a common code base to save costs and boost innovation, in the mobile market Linux has tended toward entropy.

Such entropy more

Microsoft--down but by no means out

The living dead never looked so good.

For several years now Microsoft has been written off by friends and foes alike as a shuffling shadow of its former self, doomed to feed off the profits of past successes while it goes gentle into the good night of irrelevance. And yet Microsoft's profits remain enviable and its outlook far from bleak.

It may be too soon to engrave Microsoft's headstone as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently did.

Microsoft, after all, has a history of making dramatic changes in direction, changes that have saved it more than once from software

The upside to Apple's control freakishness

Google attracts an ever-growing horde of Android-loving developers. But can Google's developer growth outpace Apple's?

It's not clear, especially as the developer battle spans both client and cloud.

I'm a big fan of Google's open-source approach, but there are signs that Apple's control-all-delete-competitors approach is working and will continue to work. That is unless, of course, Google can effectively counter consumer lust for Apple gadgets with compelling cloud services that tie to a broader range of devices.

Google, while making a lot of progress with Android, has a long road ahead of it. However more

Analyst: New developer demographics favor Linux, PHP

After all, according to at the Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, speaking here Thursday at the 2010 Palmetto Open Source Conference, the rising generation of developers are more familiar with Ruby and PHP than Java or .Net, and increasingly opt to develop and deploy enterprise and Web applications on Linux rather than Windows or Unix.

The beginning of the end for old-school enterprise software?

Maybe, but it's going to take time. For example, Hammond's research has led Dr. Dobbs Journal to conclude, "As the development staff at a shop turns over, the new generation will push to adopt...dynamic more

Can Mozilla be bigger than Facebook?

Mozilla has made a name for itself by taking on Microsoft Internet Explorer in the browser market, claiming as much as 30 percent of the global market with its open-source Firefox browser. Mozilla's second act, however, promises to be much more difficult, with increased competition from Microsoft but also from open-source competitors like Google Chrome.

What should Mozilla do next?

"More of the same" probably isn't going to cut it for the open-source foundation. Though Mozilla's progress is admirable (and, in some ways, amazing), it's also "an anomaly," as Mozilla executive Mitchell Baker has opined, one more

Are Microsoft Office and OpenOffice irrelevant?

Boy Genius Report has posted screenshots of the new Microsoft Office 11 for Mac, suggesting that it looks "absolutely delicious."

Do you care?

I don't mean that in any anti-Microsoft fashion. I'm just asking, "Do you still care about an office productivity suite?" I mean, in the traditional sense of that product category?

I don't, and I'm not exactly sure when my concern for Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice, for that matter) dissipated. At some point in the last few years, e-mail became my office productivity suite, with a sip here and there of Google Docs. I more