[Francis Vaughan]

Sort of chicken and egg here. Apple wanted a per chip tithe for all FW products - at the time when USB was only USB 1.0 and intended as nothing more than a simple low bandwidth bus for things like keyboards and mice. Intel balked at this, and eventually decided to invest in USB 2.0 and to bring about a true competitor. Had Intel not decided to do this they would have swung behind FW and the current issues would probably never happened. When the number of products are fewer, the volumes lower, the money available less, one would assume mistakes occur.

The exact nature of the current problem - TI verses Augere/Lucent is just plain odd. Chips get made with flaws all the time. Usually there are software workarounds. However the nature of the FW arbitration process is such that it is deep in the phy, and it looks as if a software workaround is difficult at best. Whether this was a design flaw, a specification flaw, or something that should have been caught in one of the early testing phases, hard to judge. Such answer will probably never leak out of the companies concerned. But I don't think this has much to do with the lack of FW interfaces as standard on Windows PCs.

USB is intrinsically a much simpler interface - it places much more work onto the host CPU. So software workarounds are much easier to use when the hardware is flawed. But this is part of the difference in design goals. USB won't work without a host computer (USB-to-go simply lets you put the host controller computer in the peripheral - so it can be a surrogate for the host.) Firewire can run host-less, and does not place load on the CPU - being able to DMA end to end. FW is always going to be more complex than USB. Just part of the tradeoffs in design.