I wonder how much a job like that pays? Can one apply for it? "Hi, I'd like to apply to become your designated felon. I want a company car, a nice salary and conjugal visits if I do time."

When I joined LM I was already cynical about these performance evaluations, so I tended to ignore it, but a friend of mine who joined around the same time took them very seriously at first. He worked extra hard and documented all of his accomplishments in detail. He made a very strong case for his excellent performance. He ended up with the same 3 everyone else got. His boss was honest/dumb enough to tell him straight out that he gives everyone a 3 because LM needs to keep the rates down to remain both competitive and profitable. My friend then adopted my attitude. I've moved on to better things and he is still with LM comfortably coasting. LM lost 2 high performing professionals as result. One left and the other quit trying.

I think that it is YOU who doesn't know what they are talking about. IBM's internal politics started killing them in the 1980's. Their System 3x versus PC versus 43xx versus 39x versus 9xxx versus their office division (e.g. Displaywrite). I had IBM sales guys in my office trashing other IBM divisions for God's sake. They were a mess. Internal competition denied them the synergies they could have gotten if they would have worked together. Finally they brought in an outsider (Gerstner) who cut through a lot of that and saved their company. Their middleware still sucks and they ruin every product/company they buy, but they now market to the clueless suits as one company and do quite well financially.

RIM's revenues and market share peaked in 2008, a year after the iPhone was announced. No problems at RIM. Just keep on a truckin'. Today's profits and profit margins are not the best indicator of future performance. The fact is that Microsoft has been floundering for over a decade. They've not repeated their Windows success. Office rode on Windows. What is next? Their enterprise business is doing well, but software wise they are competing with the most inept companies on the planet - IBM, SAP and Oracle - so that's not a measure of excellence. They've got time to turn it around, but it's growing short.

OMG! A RIM Evangelical. I heard you all moved to Indonesia.

Exactly. "Fat" doesn't refer to the footprint as much as it does the proportion of the workload executed in the client. A thin client renders and perhaps it formats, but does it also maintain state? If it does (e.g. HTML5) or you rely on it to do a lot of cross-field validations then I'd say your client is getting "fatter". Its a continuum, but if you lose enough hair at some point we will all agree that you are bald.

Oh you kids! I bet you are talking about some fancy modern FORTRAN like FORTRAN 77 or later. When I was a young coding buckaroo all we had was FORTRAN 66. Not that was definitely not portable. It wasn't even complete. Every vendor had to complete the language with their own extensions in order to do any thing with memory or I/O. You had it easy.

There is a giant mass of body hair in the southern hemisphere and another in the arctic that are impeding the water from redistributing itself more evenly around the globe. It'll get cleaned up when the maid comes next week. Sorry.

Would you guys please quite insulting the retards by comparing them with these clowns? (Sorry all you clown people.)

How many billions does it take to update a product that's over 20 years old? Apple sells nothing at a loss and they have a comparable suite of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation that sells for less than $60 for your entire family. Somehow they make a small profit on it. Open Office/Libre Office is a free download. They're not getting billions in donations for that.

M$ profit margin is, I believe, higher than Apple's. M$ charges $400 for a copy of Office - digital download. What's the margin on that do you think? M$ has successfully pushed the low margin part of the business to the OEMs while retaining the most profitable part. Unfortunately for them those low margins leads to crappy unimaginative hardware products so now the must either share more of the pie or get into that business as well which is what they seem to be doing. Apple spent years perfecting their supply chain management and they've done the engineering but stayed out of manufacturing itself which explains a lot of their profit margin. Can M$ get that smart that quickly? They will have to partner with manufacturers and obtain high quality parts at low prices. I see trouble ahead for M$ if they go this route. Perhaps their very profitable enterprise business will bankroll this experiment for some years, but success is far from certain. They're not even as big as Apple anymore.

So the iPad uses Bluetooth instead of a wire to connect to a keyboard. Oops, it looks like Surface does to. You complain about the $60 for a keyboard, well you can use any valid bluetooth keyboard, not just Apple's, but more importantly we don't know the pricing of Surface or its keyboard covers so it's hard to say which has the better keyboard price. (We don't know the Surface's battery life, performance, screen quality, if it can do cellular - didn't mention it - or much of anything else that will matter when making a decision.) The camera connector for iPad includes a USB port if you really want one. I find that wireless works just fine. That's how I print too. I have an Airprint printer so it's automatic. Before that I ran a little utility on my iMac that my iPad could send documents to for printing. We have wireless printing from iPads here at work too. You should try wireless. I hear it's the wave of the future for mobile devices. We don't seem to have any problems administering iPads here. All our execs and many others have them. The software doesn't have to be Apple approved or distributed. You do need a cert from Apple, but that's it. Kinda helps with keeping malware out. I guess you don't know much about iPads. Now, one of the many questions I have about Surface is why, if I wanted a "real PC" with a "real keyboard" would I buy a Surface instead of a laptop/ultrabook? At least with them I don't need a table to put it on.

Maybe you weren't alive when the iPod first came out. Apple still had one foot in the grave. Their fans were a fraction of what they are today. The iPod helped to revive the Apple brand. It was the interface and iTunes making it simple to load and manage music on it that made it popular.

Very good points and let's add a bit to it. Most of us pick people as friends who have some qualities in common with us and often also some qualities we admire or respect. What those are varies from friend to friend so a given friend can influence is some ways (what we like about them) and not in other ways (what we don't think they do well). So I would think that the 1% we call influencers vary depending on what the topic is. There is no permanent and fixed 1%.

I think more of the 99% would be sympathizers if Occupy could articulate a clear message instead of emotion. The message is lost in the theater of it all.