INQ Little Difference 2005 awards announced

EVERY YEAR the INQUIRER announces nominations for awards but with a little difference. Often the nominations are there because products or strategies have made just that, little difference. This time round we've invited nominations from our team of worldwide hacks and those who could be bothered have come up with a list of contenders for the Gongs of Little Difference.

Charlie Demerjian
Best Literary Work - Fiction: Intel for their 2005 roadmaps
Best Literary Work - Non-Fiction: AMD for their 2005 roadmaps

Andrew Thomas
Apple: Making the BBC Cream Itself Award.
AMD: Dragging The Largest Number of Fanbois out of the Woodwork Award.
The BBC: Crappest Tech News Coverage.
The BBC: Most Pathetic and Ineffectual Campaign to Convince People to Move to Digital TV Award.
BT: The Most Hated Organisation Award (Lifetime Achievement).

Nick Farrell
Biggest self-inflicted public relations screw up -- Sony for its DRM software

Ambrose McNevin
Nominate Mike Magee for forgetting to put several hundred INQ dollars behind a West End bar for his writers to fill their livers
Most gnomic channel strategy statements - New HP CEO Mark 'nebulous' Hurd
CA. Just for being CA.
Computacenter taking things from bad to farce with the directors trying - and so far failing - to buy back the company from investors

Arron Rouse
Nvidia: the ATI Thank You award for cancelling major product lines just before the Christmas rush
Nvidia: a second ATI Thank You award for handing over the Christmas AGP market
ATI: the Nvidia Thank You award for its Crossfire Technology; so little, so late and so unreliable
Intel: the AMD Thank You award for the current Xeon line-up that could have been designed especially to let Opteron gain new customers
Intel: the Society of Electricity Generation Corporations award for increasing electricity demand
Motorola and Apple: the Obvious Stupidity award for not allowing the Rokr to download music on the move
Sony, Toshiba, et al: the Betamax award for spending billions on the competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats
Microsoft: the Clive Sinclair Rush To Market award for getting so many barely working XBox 360s to market in time for Christmas
Electronic Arts: the Microsoft Service Pack award for releasing so many games before they were finished
Apple: Lifetime Achievement in Marketing award for making so many people pay so much for worse audio quality than a 1970s cassette
Intel: the Frankenstein award for keeping the Itanium breathing long after it died

Theo Valich
Best Available 3D Product - outside journoworld: Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX 256MB
Best Unavailable 3D Product - living in dreams only: Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX 512MB
Not Gonna Happen Award: Intel beating AMD in PC games
Lost in Translation Award: Jack Thompson
Rumour of The Year: Fudo has 24 pipelines
Turning People into Zombies Award: World of Warcraft
Crappiest Tech Support Award: Blizzard, for pretending their server problems didn't exist