A report in arstechnica predicts that the FireWire (or IEEE 1394 standard) is on a rocky popularity road and may eventually shrink to a niche connection status, rather like SCSI.
This is unfortunate, because FireWire is technically superior to the Universal Serial bus. It has the ability to daisy-chain devices (which is why you see two FireWire sockets on most peripherals), it can allocate different bandwidths to devices on the same bus, which unlike the behaviour of USB means it doesn't all decrease to a crawl when a slower peripheral is attached. Furthermore, the FireWire bus speed allocation and functions are completely handled by the interface itself, whereas USB has to be dealt with by the CPU and therefore can be a significant drain on the whole computer performance.
So raw speed isn't everything, yet other factors are said to have influenced the demise of FireWire. Intel quickly integrated USB into its chipsets, whereas FireWire was left as an add-on in the form of cards. The relatively high royalties charged on merely having a FireWire port on a PC also initially dissuaded manufacturers from fitting it to their computers.
The end result after several years of USB cementing its place as a 'standard' peripherals interface, is that FireWire may probably only have its place in the non-PC arena, such as DV camcorders and standalone DVD recorders. There is the remote possibility that when high definition camcorders become more affordable and widely available, that there may be a small resurgence of interest in what may be the best interface to acquire such a high volume of data, reliably and quickly to a PC.
