Frolic With The Technology Dragons—2006 Will Be An Amazing Year!

Google and Microsoft are about to do battle head-to-head (remember: you heard it here first). Google seems to be advancing its network infrastructure in a way that makes me believe the company is actually constructing what amounts to its own sub-Internet. Google also seems to be repositioning itself as a search and application service. At the same time, Microsoft appears to be positioning itself as the enabling software and content partner on every electronic device you can think of including the PC, Smartphone, PDA, television, multimedia computer and portable multimedia device. More on these two behemoths a bit later.

The first glimmer of hardware aggravations for 2006 are already revealing themselves in the form of the newly joined battle over high capacity DVD playback and recording formats. It's Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD. The usual suspects are arrayed before each other—Sony, Toshiba, Phillips, Pioneer, Hewlett-Packard and on and on—all vying to trump the other. The most hysterically disorganized thing about the whole controversy is that the technical engineering steering and standards development groups for each format have yet to fully nail down the specifications for each format. They're changing every week for Pete's sake. More . . .