Of course outsourcing companies can provide very good quality services. For that to happen, you need to pay a lot of money and throw a lot of resources at it, not least of all having a well run governance framework on both sides of the fence. Oh wait, I'm spending the same amount of money, just happens to be on a cheque to the outsourcer instead of payrolls.

So, less ads and no data mining, it will get money via unicorns I presume.

Exactly.

All the people bragging about how they don't need certs make me laugh. As a router guy I have lost count of the number of uncertified engineers I've worked with who claim total competency yet somehow have major blind spots for things they've never implemented in production. Guess what, if you did your studies you'd at least know the basics and get up to speed quickly.

Esp in R&S the focus is often very strongly on fundamentals. I don't care if you learnt OSPF via CCNP or JNCIP both courses will teach you the fundamentals and the information is completely portable.

yes how dare they try to monetise, they should give you everything for free forever

Well, the big difference is that geeks (at least those paid to work as geeks, and by that I don't count first/second level tech support drones) are on a pretty good wicket (i.e. easily the top 20-30% of wages).

Also, er, these 'first world problems' are a lot less serious than working conditions in the industrial revolution....

not surprising that most people (even geeks) don't give a rats

My money is on a major backend upgrade gone foobar and somehow foobarring the rollback (if they even considered rollbacki?!?!?!). Either that or their prod is completely hosed somehow (fire etc.) and they've had to switch on their never properly tested, not properly built or scoped DR that was just put in to tick some audit by a non IT person putting a check next to a box.

A break-fix does not take 5 days to resolve, not even a large SAN.

I've seen some rank amateurish behaviour by enterprises with multi million dollar turnovers so its no surprise for a monopolist vendor like Pearson to sit there and watch the money roll in. Unless there is some kind of legal/contractual or PR ramification from downtime mgt just don't get it until it happens.

I agree entirely and I'm in the former boat and have dealt with many times with the latter (global parent company, providers, migrating to mgd services etc.). The difference in the turnaround time for anything (faults or projects/implementations ) is absolutely amazing, and so its the level of competency (theres a lot of room for duds to hide in a large team).

The trick is to find an environment that lets you do the former but has the size/scale that lets you play with the big iron / keep up your skills. From my networking perspective I'd say around 5000-10000 endpoints is the sweet spot.

Sums it up right there: for most people that is not the case.

Games, Adobe, MYOB, drivers for thingys, MS office/exchange stack for work, airplay/itunes (kill it with fire but hey lots of people use that stuff), etc.

Sorry wrong. Google the anandtech benchMark of current medfield in razr i vs kraitkrait. It's competitive NOW and that's without process advantage

Thats a side issue, the main point is that Elop osborned their entire current inventory without being in a position to release any WP phones for nearly a year.
google the osborne effect, its a textbook example of commercial suicide.

It would have been a totally different story had they said 'well we're going WP all in, and hey, here's our new shiny, its in store next week'.

re: differentiation, Pureview, city lens, mapping etc. can easily be used to differentiate on any platform including Android

Thats exactly our point though, they could have gone with WP7, WP8 on the side or as part of a multi-OS strategy without osborning their entire symbian inventory and at one stroke destroying their main cash flow with WP7 still 9 months or so from launch and WP8 18 months.

Nobody is saying (aside from Tomi on the blog who's a bit biased as you can probably tell) that they should have kept going with symbian. Its the execution of the WP strategy that is a total disaster.

Does not change the topic that they left themselves with their pants down in the market for 18 months with this choice. Unbelievable. Had they say not gone WP exclusive then they would have had backup options or been able to do something else in this time.

Its even more unbelievable had they known when they made wp7 decision that it was always a stopgap going to be non-upgradeable to wp8 etc. and if they didn't know then what were their lawyers doing or did MSFT straight up lie about their roadmap (even I know enough about big commercial decision that you don't make a deal like this without some very concrete, contractually backed roadmap agreements).

Way to look at a figure without any context whatsoever

And if unlike most geeks you have the faintest interest in finance, a cursory look at the balance sheet will show you how much of a 'shot in the arm' that billion dollars turned out to be. 1 billion doesn't even begin to cover the losses incurred after the burning platforms memo - and thats just the EXTRA losses (compared to extrapolating the then current rate of losses downwards in a straight effin line).

Why do most geeks bemoan the general population for their technical ignorance, yet will act like a typical consumer moron when it comes to financial topics

"Any one with objective mind will appreciate what Microsoft has done."

Bzzzzt wrong. All Nokia should have focused on is what consumers would appreciate, and they are most certainly not objective minds....

All the arguments about android being too 'me too' conveniently ignore the massive handicaps of WP adoption - low single digit user base, poor carrier / channel relations, MS being MS esp in mobile space.... and also overlook the fact that android would have let Nokia leverage their traditional brand instantly (I don't know if you're American, but in case you are, prior to 2009 or so, Nokia was seen as the IBM of the mobile phone world by the entire world barring the USA and possibly Japan) - something you could trust.

+11111 exactly it
for years and years my entire family bought nothing but nokias. We never even so much as looked at another vendor.

Then my sister and myself got droids, palmed mum off to the altar of steve (less tech support lol) and nobody has even looked at a nokia since. I don't think they even realise Nokia started making 'real smartphones' again (spare me the symbian diatribes, I know the feature lists etc. but I'm talking about common user perception) and nobody is remotely interested in switching platforms