A common complaint about Xbox Live is that Microsoft is charging for something that you get for free on any other platform (PC, PS3, Wii). For many people free is their favorite four-letter word, and it is just a price you cannot beat. The inability to charge for online services of any sort (read: not just gaming) is a major problem though. This isn’t just about games, here’s why.

I have recently been in the market for a new smartphone. The iPhone looks like some nice hardware and I’m already an AT&T customer, but after seeing news like this I’m just not buying. Apple has proven to me that I don’t want to live in a closed ecosystem. Sometimes it really is true that “you don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone.”

BTW, I really didn’t want to post anything pro-Microsoft or anti-Apple today, but this was the news I was dealt. :)

For those of you who maybe haven’t heard about Microsoft’s latest OS “Mojave” you should check out their website for it before reading any further. Even if you’ve already heard about Mojave you owe it to yourself to check out the videos on their site before you read any further.

If the on-going debacle that is MobileMe is to highlight anything it is this: don’t do Apple 1.0. They may have some great ideas but their history with introducing new products is terrible. Even I was shocked when I started making this list of their recent 1.0 snafus.

In my review of the latest versions of Opera and Firefox I noted that I really appreciated not having to “roll my own browser” from scratch with Opera. Extensions can be great for Firefox but I think some of them should really come built-in. Maybe not enabled by default, but you shouldn’t have to hunt around to find this functionality.