Blackberry started out as two or 3 special tricks.

1) it was by far the best way to get corporate email in your pocket. The keyboard was a part of this, easiest way to reply.

2) It also had BBM, which in certain places made it special for cutting down SMS costs (SMS has huge huge margins for carriers).

3) Less important, it had excellent battery life, meaning the older phones could go days without a charge.

Now, all of those specialties are gone.

1) EVERYbody does corporate email. Android and iOS have closed the gap, and in some ways eclipsed Blackberry (iOS 7 per-app vpn - a corporate vpn for a special email account/app obviates some of the need for BES, saving cash).

2) iMessage, Line, Whatsapp, google voice/hangouts.. There are so many competitors in this space. iMessage is so much easier to use. BBM userids is so cryptic some say it's "security through obscurity"

3) People would trade off processor speed and flexibility for battery life. Witness the OctoCore processors on some phones now. Or the battery needed to pump some of the 6" plus screens. If battery life was so critical, you'd have small RAM small screen single core devices winning the sales war.

And the biggest that Blackberry never saw coming:

4+) Apple (and android) have shown that people don't want an email device as much as they want a flexible computer in their pocket. Paraphrasing Balmer, "applications, applications, applications....." If you're gonna have a bulky phone, it might as well do a lot.

So, in a turnaround, what's the core competency they can turn to? a physical keyboard is nice, but cuts down screen real estate for non-typing apps. The fact that no major Android manufacturer has a physical keyboard on their showcase phones shows it's not a requirement. Besides, they could add one if needed. Apple never will, and they sold 10 million phones in about a weekend plus.

BlackBerry is toast. There is no way they will keep making phones. They may soldier on selling BES for a bit.

I'll assume this is a real question from someone that doesn't know the quote.

Turtle = TSA Agent?

There is a legend of how the universe is constructed that the Earth lies on the back of a giant turtle. But wait, what does the turtle stand on? Ummmm, well another turtle. OK, what does that stand on? Eventually you get to "turtles all the way down".

It's become a phrase in some situations where you wave away a hard problem by having more and more layers of the same, turtles all the way down.

Intellectual Property should be subject to a Property tax. If you can buy it, it should be taxed.

Id upgrade it just for avoiding driveby malware attacks. IE6 was/is horrible in this regard, not sure how targetted is FireFox 2.0 on Linux.

I can't confirm now (source is slash dotted) but I don't remember them talking about abuse of "email as authorization" to most Internet sites.

Say I do this. Even if I split my emails out to having a "bank/amazon/eBay" reset email, the IMAP proxy settings seem to me would would let them check my email, and set password resets from my bank. Scary.

Guessing the branch might seem difficult. However, the college I went to, and I assume many others, has a bank offer to sign up all freshmen for free checking accounts with a debit card. All those signing up with get the same first 10 digits (possibly 11 or 12). It leaves very little to guesswork.

I used to work in the bookstore at my university. Some first 4 digit combos are permanently stuck in my brain, such as 4128 (Citibank Visa), 4673 (Citibank gold visa, iirc), 5424 (citibank mastercard.. lot of citicards at my uni). Remember that most cards are run through some bank in North Dakota since ND has lax interest laws. Number of branches is much smaller than you think.

I'll just leave this here

Top Secret, very under the radar movie....

Linux "beat BSD" for a few reasons.

First, BSD had to fight a huge lawsuit against AT&T to even exist. You should thank them, because without them winning Linux's future would be in doubt.

Next, they picked a bad development model. Linus was much more open, and the code moved faster. The BSD folks were more insular (read: snobby) and it cost them. this has nothing to do with license issues.

BSD stumbled a bit around BSD 5, adding a (more complicated than needed) complicated scheduler. In doing so, they lost one of their best coders. Imagine if Linux lost Alan Cox right when 2.0 was about to roll out, and forecast they'd still be as popular.

The license thing probably didn't help either, but you can debate that a bit - name me a GPL web server as popular as apache? Perl is more BSDish. Python is some hybrid. Mozilla, etc. there's popular BSDish licensed code.

My theory is license matters, but less than management. The GPL magic dust didn't help GCC from being essentially abandoned around 2.7-2.8 days, and picked up by an outside group (egcs). It didn't make emacs better than xemacs. Thank Linus for transitioning from a curious college dude to a pretty good steward of the software that drives billions in revenue.

All those together made huge first mover advantage for Linux. Either you say a good chunk of Linux's growth was due to early adopter advantage and network effects, or you need to also say that Windows succeeded because of quality.

About once a year a kamikaze squirrel takes out a transformer here and takes out power to a few blocks. It hit us when we moved in. The power failure ruined a new fridge worth of food for our neighbors

Though google was better at searches, I think where it was really better was its search input parameter processing.

Altavista back in the day was an engineering exercise. (Remember how long it was before they had Altavista.com). As such, it's full of nice geekisms like boolean operators and parenthetical constructs. Most people couldn't understand that.

Google was always more of a natural language input system. The only "operators" most people use are + and -, and use their algorithms to kind of guess the rest.

Don't underestimate how much a good UI can help. Think of how many people use DVRs to record vs how many people used recording features on their VCRs. VCRs have the advantage of being able to back up and share recordings easily, but the DVR has taken over TV recording, because no one could get them to work as they wanted.

HTDig. I remember trying to get it work on my site, then my boss went a new direction.

There were various spiders. There was even URouLette, which was a random-link-from-a-web-spiders-db. You couldn't do that now, with all the porn and driveby malware sites.

There were various web frontends to WAIS, which never really caught on.

And if you want to expand search engine past web search engines, there was Archie for ftp. Oh, you mean searching a Hypertext-ish system? Well there was Veronica and Jughead, for little used gopher.

Another post mentioned Internal Rate of Return. Basically, you calculate what the yearly return is, on average.

Then you could use this to compare to other investments. Including real estate, bonds, etc. For the Expanding Campuses, you'd need to calculate that IRR as well and compare.

In general, the Skype IRR would be less than buying Apple stock :)

My bad mind saw "huge penetration" and made me think of Chatroulette, and not Skype.

Though you may love WinCE - and I don't doubt you do, it obviously fit your needs perfectly - having a single data point doesn't counter my original point. Nor does a single data point of you not liking iOS or Android. The base fact is: WinCE was created to crush Palm, and it did not. Palm lasted long after.

The fact that Palm died due to mismanagement, letting the OS languish, and misjudging the market does not mean WinCE fulfilled Gate's goal of crushing the opposition. WinCE was always too complex, too much trying to get a desktop metaphor into a 4 inch screen with stylus to work. The fact that Microsoft has done the same mistake but 180 degree opposite - forcing a touch screen UI on a desktop OS - shows they still don't get it, but that's a different discussion.

My point is/was not that WinCE is worthless, but that it's an also-ran in the space it was designed for... pocket consumer devices. Bill was (rightfully) worried about small non-Windows devices obviating some of the necessity for normal Windows PCs. In this specific space, it failed. iPhone/Android + Cloud is taking over some of the PC space. WinCE should have given Bill G a *huge* head start in this space. Now they're playing catchup, and badly.

And yes, I still encounter WinCE devices. Our network printers run WinCE. (Got the slammer worm a while back, but that's a cheap shot). But WinCE isn't the sole owner of the industrial space. Yes, WinCE has the advantage of better modularity (which may contribute to undercounting - you won't recognize a custom UI on a WinCE kernel). But I'm starting to see iOS devices used in more business/industrial/commercial settings, as cash registers and such.

Microsoft's foray into portable devices has been an abject failure.

True, but this is a problem with Microsoft in general, not just Ballmer. WinCE was released in Nov 1996, over 10 years before the iPhone. With a 10 year lead, WinCE was nothing ever than an also-ran, not even being able to beat PalmOS.