Yeah, before all those search engines I was confronted with all sorts of opinions. Socialist and capitalist, religiuous and atheist. I talked to Chinese as well as Americans and Africans, who came travelling by at my doorstep, and I had teachers with a plethora of different ideological viewpoints as well as many different foster parents each providing new perspectives.

Then came google and cut me off from all those viewpoints.

Typical TED.

What are you talking about?

The ideological difference between the republicans and the democrats in the US is *huge* compared to Germany, and it's getting larger and larger with the rise of the Tea Party. In Germany, you don't have to bother to vote: I really doesn't matter who wins.

I think it's fantastic.

As long as students are taught something, however irrelevant, no one complains.

But if it becomes plain and obvious for everyone to see that it's nothing but malice that sends students to schools were learning isn't even a goal anymore, time will come where there is an end to this farce.

You're right, but there are many things that contribute to whether one's able to provide what customer's want.

One thing that many competitors are lacking is described in Steve Ballmer's eternal wisdom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La_u1jPLOIA

Yes, it's funny, and yes, that's what they do better than others.

As others pointed out, none of those are both innovative and not government-funded.

Microsoft invented Ajax by putting in the non-standard XmlHttpRequest stuff.

People got very upset about it, but in the end it created a mind shift from the www being about content to the www being about applications. I repeat: The "Internet Explorer 5" contained the most important innovation in browser history.

More importantly: .NET

Microsoft is a large company. They usually don't invent a genious new algorithm or user interface or some such - these are things that *small* companies do and then they get bought or copied.

Microsoft innovates by merging many old independent technologies into one, coherent one.

Today, you have MS office bindings from a purely functional language.

And can use the same compiled code in a web browser as well as on a windows phone as well as on a server.

And use a language that is almost as powerful as C++ while being as easy to write and understand as Java.

And design you UI in Blend and have a coder open the same project in VS.

And do the last thing in a browser (Silverlight) or desktop application with little difference.

If that's not innovation, then you don't think big enough.

Thank goodness that MS wasn't destroyed.

It would have suffered if they did.

There is a bag of technologies that consist of a virtual machine flexible enough to compile C to (albeit with security compromises), as well as a bunch of other languages (without such compromises). One of them makes it the first purely-functional language to have bindings to an API that makes it actually be usable for something.

The virtual machine can be hosted on desktops, servers, webbrowers and windows phone (Silverlight) and within SQL server (!) (stored procedures).

In particular, it's the also only technology to allow a browser application to share compiled (!) code with it's server component, as well as sharing (uncompiled) UI code with a desktop or phone implementation.

That's about the technologies itself, not the tools for them.

Microsoft is the most innovative of the large IT companies, and by a long, long way. If it was split up, would someone else have made .NET? I think not.

The Microsoft of 15 years ago could be righteously denounced by people who's horizon was limited to the technical side of things (nerds), but to denounce it today is letting your hatred defeat your love of progress.

Mod parent up.

All elements, the priests, the fanatics, the seeking of converts, selling of indulgences to sinners, the end of the world and the church listed.

We won't accomplish anything *together*, because we can't agree (as a nation or mankind even).

Mankind obviously achieves much more than ever, just not together.

There's plenty of moderates, both in the sense of having no opinion and having a strong opinion between the poles.

What you're missing is the *absence* of the poles: You want the "extremism" to go away. Or to put it in less nice words, you want conformism.

People don't hate cars quite as much as they hate facebook, that's why.

You presonally can't control them, but if they screw to many like you, people won't come to them in too few numbers.

That's the control I meant.

Maybe facebook and other popular content sites have something to offer that a self-hosted site doesn't provide. Better SEO/coverage for example.

In that light, the contracts aren't single-sided (note that the "customers" usually don't pay). That's neither stupid nor disgusting.

That's very wise, but is this a RMS attitude? Never heard him talk like that.

And also, *this* is where it gets disgusting and stupid (although this doesn't apply to the OP's blogger).

And why should the company that wanted to take over her identity not have had the trademark? In fact, they probably do have it. According to the blogger, it had existed under that name since 2002, before she was successful and there was any argument.

All owners of a service are under control of the customers, which have an interest in the reliability of their identity.