Is there anyone who really thought it would go any other way?

I did. I've been following this since it started. They seemed to have a fairly high degree of commitment and had made tons of progress. I'm shocked to see them throwing in the towel since after a decade I'd assume they no longer have a Windows culture. We know that institutions that never developed a Windows culture were able to switch to Linux easily.

So yeah put me down for surprised.

Yes. But once you examine an application you get detailed review information. You can also see summary review information when you examine the list.

Apps get reviewed by users and have a star rating for their functionality. That already happens.

Funny your suggestions already exist. Any phone can go against any server via. downloading an alternative profile and that server can have its own app distribution. https://developer.apple.com/pr...

It doesn't require rooting your phone. So yes Apple not only could do this, they do it now and have for years.

I think the app store should be organized for hundreds of thousands of applications better categorized. In particular searching by verticals, searching by interconnections to other applications, searching by level of sales... Mostly though I think the app store works pretty well the issue for most applications is they are yet another version of something for which better apps exist. The problem app developers are having is they aren't going after verticals which is where they should be in a more mature market.

If costs are anywhere near that high, this should just be a national system and not handled by localities at all. It is just insane to do this more than once.

If one reads the computerworld article it makes far weaker claims than this post. It is talking about revenue and cost of revenue. It isn't clear about inventory on hand so to get a maximum figure it marks the manufactured but unsold Surface 3's at $0. Part of a $733 million charge came from the Surface mini (developed and never shipped). There never was any claim remotely as strong as Microsoft having lost close to $1.7b in a meaningful sense. This figure is coming from:

a) Whisper down the lane where articles are summarizing each other getting successively less qualified in their calculations.
b) Accounting being boring so the article writers not understanding what the original analyst (Jan Dawson at Jackdaw Research) was doing.

Franchise destroying blunders are peer reviewed by the business press among others.

So, Android is the best choice because you (meaning a team of concerned citizens) can essentially take all the privacy leaking parts out and create a private and secure system.

The versions used in the United States haven't had that done (mostly though some phones like Amazon's might be an exception). So what could happen and what the current state is are different. But moreover they can't really. Android as used in the USA includes the Google Play layer which is not open source and can't be modified. Certainly base Android is easy to separate from Google as the Chinese market demonstrates but the ecosystem cannot be severed.

And I didn't get your last sentence at all.

They get clean once they stop racing. The big drugs used are Lasix (which controls bleeding in the lungs), phenylbutazone (an anti-inflammatory), and cortiscosteroids (for pain and inflammation). Also for many horses steroids and pain killers. Those aren't needed for breeding just racing.

Abandoned by Apple and Microsoft - lol what? Apple never used Java, they have always used their own languages.

Not at all true. When OSX came out Apple had a series of 4 core programming modes: Classic (ran against an OSX9 emulator), C++/Carbon (ran directly against OSX), Objective-C/Cocoa and Java/SDK. Overtime the Java SDK got pulled further and further from the core. But there is no question that Apple was a huge Java proponent, many people often thinking it was the future of OSX development around 2001.

Windows 8, and in fact Microsoft's whole "One UI" strategy is management driven.... Zune, was actually a decent device but management killed the program

That's not in any possible sense a bug. It is a strategic choice you disagree with. As for not releasing products when programmers say you should. I think Perl 6 provides a pretty good example of what happens when complex projects aren't disciplined with the "best version ships in 10 months".

I don't think the problem is so much the firmware on Android. The Samsung firmware on the Galaxy is excellent from a privacy and security standpoint. The issue is the higher up layers in the stack.

I'm not sure what you mean specifically so I can't comment on that. They seem to have a pretty good range of consumer grade privacy features that are adjustable. That's not to say that every-time there is a conflict between privacy and some other goal they optimize for privacy but they do seem to lean towards privacy and allow the privacy conscious to lean more towards privacy.

I disagree. Apple does a pretty good job on privacy and is concerned about it. They've already limited applications interactions and they are fairly secure by default. Their infrastructure allows additional privacy to be easily added on.

As for Microsoft I'm not sure where you are disagreeing with me.