The Apple iPod is the most influential consumer electronics product of this decade. . . as scores of erstwhile competitors in the MP3 player industry have discovered to their dismay. But one company, SanDisk, has managed to survive as a comfortable Number Two to Apple by keeping its ambitions small, its products niche-oriented and most of all, by staying out of Apple's way. Now the company has come out with a clever new player that offers an entirely different approach to downloading music, and promises to keep SanDisk a Numero Dos to Apple for years to come. Commentary by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

Everyone knows that in the quarter century-long battle between Microsoft and Apple, the latter has always suffered two key weaknesses -- not enough software and too high a price. The first took care of itself: you merely had to walk into your neighborhood electronics store to notice that the Windows software section (including all of the games) took up half the display space, while Apple software filled a single shelf. What has always been inexplicable is why Microsoft has never pressed harder on the latter. After all, one of the great marketing stories in the history of high tech is how, in the late 1970s, Hewlett-Packard (more software, higher prices, a cult following) lost the calculator wars to the less powerful, cruder, but far cheaper machines offered by Texas instruments. Yet, Microsoft has always seemed to shy away from discussing the obviously decisive price differential between Windows versus Apple computers. Perhaps it was because Microsoft, along with with its strategic partners like HP, Dell, Compaq and Sony, believed that this factor was also self-evident to customers. Or maybe, back in the days when Apple was down in the mid-single digit market share percentage, it wasn't worth the trouble. But those days are long gone. Over the last decade, Apple has come roaring back, taking advantage of its clear superiority in operating system, user interface and hardware design. Yet, Microsoft has still play as if it had one hand tied behind its back. Well, those days may at last be over: Microsoft has just unleashed an ad campaign that goes right to the heart of Apple's absurdly high prices. But it may be a case of too little, too late: the Cult of Apple, now bolstered by the world-changing iPod and iPhone, may now be so strong that it can shrug off this direct assault and happily continue to pay the company's standard 30-50 percent surcharge. See the video of MS's new commercial at the link.

Facebook has taken a lot of grief in recent months for its attempts to extract profits out of its vast (175 million member) social network. And it happened against just this week. But this time Facebook is getting a bad rap -- it did the right thing on this one, only it didn't work. There's a lot worse things -- and Facebook has tried some of them -- and this time the company should be applauded. Commentary by Edgelings Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Malone.

There's not a lot of bright spots in high tech these days . . .but the one market that still shows a spark of life is the computer game business. And the state of the art in that industry will be on display this week at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. A company to watch: OnLive. Report by KNTV-NBC reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

Three recent regulatory changes regarding the stock market -- Mark-to-market, the end of the short uptick rule, and lax enforcement of naked short selling -- have not only destroyed a vast amount of shareholder wealth, but also tipped the stock market into a dangerous bias towards short-sellers. And if the stock market is now rigged, how will it ever recover? Commentary by Forbes publisher and regular Edgelings contributor Rich Karlgaard.

In the latest move in its on-going program to screw with all things Google, China yesterday -- and, as always, without explanation -- blocked access by its citizens to YouTube. It may have had something to do with the posting of a video last week purporting to show handcuffed Tibetan prisoners being beaten by a Chinese police officer . . .an event that the official state news service claims is a staged fraud. But, for the moment, the Chinese government isn't talking.

Last week was the executive Tweeting the live break-in of his house, and Facebook rolling out (to a chorus of boos) its new Twitter-like features. Yesterday saw Lance Armstrong tweeting fans about his busted collarbone as he was loaded into an ambulance. And, in a more far-reaching story, the world's biggest on-line customer management software company, Salesforce.com, announced a new feature that lets customers find, monitor and analyze comments and complaints made about their company's products on Twitter. The feature, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, works with Service Cloud, the Web-based customer support software system. The feature's free, but the Service Cloud subscription is a thousand bucks per month. Anybody still making snide complaints that Twitter doesn't have a revenue model?

There’s a reason Google has stuck with the same simple, stripped-down home page from the beginning. Just ask Facebook, which is learning a nasty lesson about the dangers of making fundamental changes in an experience that users have fully assimilated into their daily lives. Last week, the giant social network rolled out a new redesign that seemed designed to make the Facebook experience more Twitter-like for its 175 million users. Combine that with the company’s recent decision — after a surrepticious change in its rules of usership led to a massive outcry — to solicit user comments . . .and Facebook has been besieged with 625,000 comments to date, most of them hating the new look. Now, every tech commentator from Robert Scoble to ValleyWag has jumped in to voice their own opinions, ranging from accusing Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg of not caring about his customers (ValleyWag) to telling those same customers to grow up and accept inevitable change (Scoble). Meanwhile, Facebook isn’t commenting — is it possible for those folks to be more out of synch with their users?

As we wallow deeply in our current Recession, it's hard to imagine what life, and work, will be like when the boom times come again. Yet, even now forces are at work in high tech that are already defining the markets, choosing the competitors and allies, and even beginning to skirmish and probe the opposition in what will be the giant new competitive battlegrounds of the post-Crunch boom. Here are predictions of the four biggest of these new markets, by Edgelings editor-in-chief Michael S. Malone.

Ever attended an industry conference or sales meeting that wasn't there? That's what Oracle just put on, with the help of an innovative San Francisco firm: a virtual on-line sales meeting that was indistinguishable from the real thing. Why do it? Money, of course: why the expense of flying in employees from around the world and putting on expensive show, when you can give them a comparable experience without them ever leaving the office? Saloon and strip club owners everywhere are already weeping . . .

In one fell swoop, Sony has cut a licensing deal with Google to make available twice as many books on its Reader e-Book compared to Amazon's hugely successful Kindle -- 500,000 versus 250K volumes. That's the good news; the damper is that all of the Sony e-Books will have been first published more than eighty years ago. According to the deal, which will be formally announced today, Sony will have access to the thousands (soon to be millions) of books that Google has been assiduously digitizing at famous university collections like Oxford's Bodleian Library over the last four years. This so-called Google Library Project has been controversial, particularly among authors, who fought to have their out-of-print books protected from the program. They may come to regret their decision, now that Google has found away to monetize those files. In the meantime, this move by Sony, until now almost completely overshadowed in the e-Book business by Amazon and its Kindle, has brought itself back into the game in a big way. The e-Book War is now officially on.

Apple's press conference yesterday introducing the new 3.0 operating system for the iPhone/iTouch was more than a lot of fun new applications. It was also a statement by Apple that it recognizes there are some serious new competitors out there in the smart phone world -- and that it intends to steal the march on all of them. Commentary and video by ABC-KNTV technology reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

The story broke late last night: IBM Corporation is apparently in negotiations to purchase the long-struggling computer giant Sun Microsystems for an undisclosed price. This gambit, which appears to be targeted at Sun's new line of servers, may prove to be the first salvo a major war between IBM, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard for control of the world's data centers -- a $100 billion per year business. The benighted Sun is the littlest player in this game, and thus the easiest target. Besides, it has been a financial basket case for most of this decade -- so you can bet both Sun employees and shareholders are right now high-fiving each other at the news.

It will never, ever end. It is the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce of high tech -- the lawsuit that will go on forever. Now it its 21st year -- old enough to vote itself out of this mess -- the legal battle between Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices over the former's licensing of the latter's x86 architecture has now lasted longer than the careers of the two executives behind it -- Andy Grove and Jerry Sanders. Indeed, there are few people at either company who probably even remember what set the whole thing off nearly forty years ago, when Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, needing a second source supplier for Intel chips, decided to favor a fellow ex-Fairchilder who was like a son to him, Jerry Sanders and his struggling little chip company. It was this agreement that Sanders returned to in the late 1980s when AMD, now a huge but financially troubled company, was desperately searching for a way to survive. Sanders decided to read that old agreement as permission to clone Intel's hugely successful microprocessor line . . .and the battle was on. Most of us thought the lawsuit, which has cost tens of millions over the years, was settled a decade ago. But apparently not. Earlier this week, when a once-again financially troubled AMD announced that it was selling off its manufacturing operations to a joint venture, Intel saw an opportunity and pounced -- notifying AMD that it believed their cross-licensing agreement was now void. AMD responded that by even suggesting so Intel was itself in violation of the pact. Intel then proposed that AMD allow it to make public the terms of that cross-licensing agreement. Sure, said AMD, as long as you agree to make public the documents you demanded be kept secret in our anti-trust lawsuit against you in 2005. And on it goes -- probably until after anyone reading this is long dead. With possibly a trillion dollars in potential revenues in play, neither company can ever afford to walk away from the table.

If you're like us, you probably went to work this morning expecting another week of depressing news. Well, we can't protect you from that -- sorry. But what we can do is give you a positive, indeed uplifting, story about children in desperate need and a company that comes to their aid. The story even has crime . . .but yet a happy ending. And don't we all need that right now? Story and video by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

A whole bunch of rumors about upcoming Apple products surfaced last weekend. One was that the company has filed for a bunch of patents that seem to suggest it is preparing a Nintendo Wii-type interface for AppleTV. Even more interesting was the claim made by Digg founder Kevin Rose at the SxSW conference that he had confirmed that the iPhone 3.0 will feature both multitasking (the ability to keep one application running while opening another one) and cut-and-paste -- all in an effort to compete with the still unreleased Palm Pre. Give these rumors as much credence as you always, especially mindful that Rose's track record on this sort of thing is decidedly mixed.

Four years ago, he was one of the first writers to come out and predict the impending collapse of the newspaper industry. Now that day has come. But what next? What replaces newspapers as our primary source for source for news? Who will do the deep, expensive investigations that were the newspaper industry's greatest achievements? And, if newspapers are indeed destined to die, is it possible that they can be reborn in a new, and more competitive, form? A commentary by Edgelings editor-in-chief Michael S. Malone

The first reviews are in for the new Google Voice, the company's relaunch of Grand Central, which it bought two years ago. The new product enables you to forward all incoming calls to six of your phones, home and mobile, at different locations. It also allows you to listen, or even read through automatic transciption, your phone messages (recorded by Voice) on your PC. Perhaps best of all for everyday use, Voice offers incredibly cheap international call rates. The flaws? A few operating bugs, no outgoing caller ID, and for now at least, limited availability. Overall judgement: another winner for Google.

A sight for old eyes: Apple yesterday introduced an even smaller version of its iPod Shuffle . . .with a new feature that may actually make the Shuffle more popular with older users than even the full-sized iPod: it talks. The new 4 Gbit, $79 model, capable of holding as many as 1,000 songs, announces songs and playlists to users in 14 different languages. The user controls have also been moved to the headphone wire. On the news, Apple shares jumped 4.5 percent.

One of the great truths of the stock market is that when everyone agrees on something, it's time to bet against them. That's what some of the great financial minds of the 1920s . . .and now that everyone (including the President of the United States) seems to agree that we are sliding into another Great Depression, maybe it's time to go long on the market. But it would sure be a lot less scary to do so if the Federal government didn't seem to be siding with the short-sellers. Commentary by Forbes publisher and regular Edgelings contributor Rich Karlgaard.

The new Palm Pre smartphone was one of the biggest hits of this January's Consumer Electronics Show. It was even favorably compared by some to the Apple iPhone. That was a few days after New Years; it's now nearly the Ides of March. Where's the Pre? Apparently, it's finally ready for its formal debut. But after all the delays, Palm appears to be running out of money -- and may be about to bet the store raising the cash it needs to make Pre a success. Commentary by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

Even while he was still a student, it was generally accepted that Stephen Wolfram was a once-in-a-generation mathematical genius. By graduate school he had already helped invent chaos theory. Then he shocked the academic world by choosing a career in business instead of a think tank or university. But Wolfram knew exactly what he was doing -- and his company Wolfram Research soon announced Mathematica, the revolutionary program that transformed mathematics education and made its founder rich. Never short of ambition or ego, Wolfram then set out to revolutionize all of science with a theory using cellular automata. Despite being hyped as the greatest work of its kind since Newton's Principia, "A New Kind of Science" failed to find many adherents. Apparenty chastened, Wolfram largely disappeared from the public eye. But now, he's back, and in May is expected to introduce a new "computational knowledge engine", the Wolfram Alpha, that will reportedly "compute knowledge" by organizing the Web to produce an answer to any factual question it is asked. Is this the first real challenge to the Google search engine? We'll know soon enough, but one thing for certain about Stephen Wolfram: he usually delivers only spectacular successes or equally spectacular failures.

The most frustrating and patience-testing interval of each work day are those minute we have to wait between turning on our computers and finally being able to use them. Now, a Silicon Valley software computer has come up with an application that lets you surf the web on your computer even as you wait for the rest of the machine to wake up -- proving once again that it is the little victories in life that bring us the most happiness. A report and video from regular Edgelings contributor and NBC-KNTV reporter Scott Budman.

Micro-blogging phenom Twitter seems to be on the mind of everybody in the tech world these days -- not least the management of both Google and Facebook. This week Facebook, after failing to acquire Twitter, added a Twitter-like service on its site. Meanwhile, the CEO suddenly took to publicly diminishing Twitter's value. What's the real story behind all of this? A commentary by Michael S. Malone, Edgelings editor-in-chief.

In Silicon Valley, the land of stock options, the notion of an 'ownership society' is especially pervasive -- and particularly troubling when the economy crashes. Just ask anybody in a local coffee shop, be it a computer programmer or a Chaucer scholar, how well they're sleeping at night. You'll get an earful, just as NBC-KNTV reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman discovered when took a camera crew into the neighborhood java joint. Commentary and video.

Apple yesterdays introduced several new important new products. What? You didn't hear about it? For the first time in a decade, an Apple launch event wasn't a major cultural event. It didn't make headline news. It didn't rally Macolytes from around the world. What's the difference this time? Everybody knows the answer: without Steve Jobs, the life has gone out of the consumer electronics party. A commentary by KNTV-NBC tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.