Phones "only a few hundred dollars - less in America". Yeah, good luck with that. New smart phones are $199, sure, but I pay $250 a month for three data plans and three phones and I get a hefty employee discount. When I was young, I would have NEVER prioritized a phone, at current expense, over other things. Phone plans are like a car payment, but it never ends as long as you are using a phone. It's no wonder young people don't have cable, or sometimes, cars.

Reasons to never visit a chain theater again. They are worse than chain restaurants. If you can, go to a local "movie and brews" type place. Alamo Draft House, for example here in Austin. No lines - you buy online, you print your ticket, you reserve your seat, they bring food to you. Bonus: they ban texting and talking and don't let people in after the movie starts. THAT'S how to run a theater. Not 3 gallon buckets of popcorn for $10, not gimmicky Movie premieres. Good food, good beer, good service, and no moronic customers allowed.

Maybe you could site a modern first generation car...something maybe in the 21st century? I think you might find that new car quality is at a high-point.

My wife was a non-traditional student recently. We bought an iPad because one term of books cost more than the iPad. Nobody told us the e-books were gonna be just as expensive as the physical books, and they expired to boot. Not the iPad's fault, but iPad-as-cost-savings is a pretty short sighted strategy.

She did like not having to carry 25 lbs. of books around in 100+ temps though.

Exactly this. Microsoft just keeps piling on layers of code to existing legacy code in fear of losing that Microsoft Word 4.0 user, at the expense of everyone else.

Blasphemy! Microsoft has made lots of really cool things, like Songsmith!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E

I have a simpler analysis of the decision makers at Microsoft. They never consider "just make good stuff that people want to buy" as a plausible business model.

If you don't think iOS is stealing from Microsoft's (and Apple's) OS market, you are delusional.

This comment makes me sad for humanity. Also, if this were true, why do they serve 3 gallon servings of soda? That just makes bigger asses, allowing for fewer asses per screening.

And here I was being all pragmatic and equating "flop" with "bad movie". Lest I forget, I live in the land of the stupid where the only thing that matters is making money.

Again, missing the point. People don't "need" outlook. They think they do, they buy an iPad, configure the mail tool to their exchange server, then forget they ever needed outlook in the first place. There's no point in arguing because if people really wanted to do Office stuff on their tablet devices, they wouldn't be buying millions of iPads. But they are, because they don't want to, which is the point Microsoft is missing.

These ads only further the notion that MS doesn't get it. Only geeks care about sd cards and number of USB ports. People don't care about buzzwords like "multitasking". People don't buy iPads to create PowerPoint slides. People DO play chopsticks on their iPad. It really isn't that difficult. Keep your head in the past then wonder why nobody is buying your products...

But Microsoft has a long history of doing this. I think the business tactic of "wait for Apple, then do that" has grown long in the tooth for the MS faithful, and they are really bad at copying otherwise good technologies.

The other problem MS has is they have low standards...they don't get what makes teh shiny desirable. Their version of teh shiny is zune brown and WinXP Fisher Price interfaces. "Close Enough" should be their corporate byline.

Probably because this "obvious answer" hasn't been accurate in probably 5-10 years. It used to be en vogue to mock how useless a Mac was, until people actually started using them. Now the argument, "look what the PC guy can do" is actually kind of a joke for millennials (and even some of us Gen X'ers) who understand productivity is no longer measured by number of spreadsheet rows or PowerPoint slides.

Immediately stop reading anytime somebody stars off with, "Dude, the zune was awesome..."