And to be honest, Azure is probably the best cloud platform there is currently. It integrates beautifully with Visual Studio. When you compile your code you can run it directly in Azure and even debug it in the process. You have to test it yourself how easy it is actually is, there's no other platform that makes it so streamlined. If Microsoft does something right it's developing tools for programmers.

How does Facebook or Microsoft sell your data? To begin with, Microsoft always asks you first if they can collect anonymous usage data. Google doesn't even ask.

Secondly, Facebook also uses data the same way that Google does - to show relevant ads. They don't sell that data to anywhere. Hell, it's their largest asset, they would be insane to do stuff like that.

* Google's business model fundamentally relies on violating peoples privacy and selling users private information.

That is all that needs to be said, even while there's a lot more.

And seriously, you can make that kind of list of any company, even Microsoft. MS does a lot of cool R&D in Microsoft Research, they give out software freely to students, they give out Visual Studio Express freely, they support charities, and they also massively support open source software outside of their core business.

Google does a lot of evil things. You can't kill an innocent little girl and get off of it by saying "but look, I also help homeless people by giving them food!". If you do evil, you do evil, and you should be punished for it, no matter if you do good things as well.

You seriously think Russia can't ignore international agreements if they want to? US does all the time, Russia can too. Even if just to show off to USA. What will the rest of the world do if Russia ignores the agreements? Stops buying energy from them? People in Europe better get used to having no electricity, and prepare for a cold winter.

Yes it does, and Microsoft has fully published the details so people can make their own implementations. If Mono is lacking behind on something, well, that's Mono's developers fault.

On the other hand, Google App Engine is competely closed. No published docs, no information about the API's, no open source code. Fully proprietary platform, from Google.

And would you say this same thing about Microsoft and their Office file formats? "Don't like MS Office file formats? Write your own and don't support them!" Google has seriously brainwashed you. They do all the same bad things Microsoft, Facebook and many other "bad" companies do but you're too clueless to see it.

It wasn't free from the beginning either, you know. Now they just seriously limited the resources and raised prices. Since slashdotters think Google is so much about open source and free software, why is App Engine backend proprietary. I'm not even asking something like their search engine code, just the App Engine backend so that people can move to other service providers with their projects if Google charges too much. Oh yeah, but Google doesn't want that. They won't open source it because then they couldn't lock down developers.

And that is exactly why it's insanely stupid idea to start relying on something Google makes. For all you know they will just shut it down the next day.

CoffeeScript has a better probability in succeeding too. No one in their sane minds would start using some test project from Google after all the canceled and abandoned projects. At least JavaScript has actual support and standards behind it, and it's widely supported. Google will probably just kill off this project a little after you've spent good amount of time learning and getting used to it and implementing it in your projects. With JavaScript (and CoffeeScript) you won't just some day come to slashdot and see Google's announcement how they've decided to discontinue the project to spend time on something better and newer.

Yep, pretty much like they did with Google App Engine. Lock the developers down first, then raise prices significantly. Oh, and since it's unique platform and the backend is closed, you either have to accept whatever price Google is asking or abandon the project and code it again from the beginning. So much for Google's openness. Their new business motto seems to be borrowed from Microsoft - "Embrace, extend and extinguish".

I really doubt Microsoft is that interested in Slashdot. Facebook, Twitter and other sites are the largest ones. Slashdot is just some site where they get dissed at no matter what they do.

You shouldn't assume anything based on that beta preview. It's not complete and it's missing complete features, the ones being start menu. This beta is mostly for tablet manufacturers and app developers so they can start experiencing with the new Windows. When Windows 8 will be released, and most likely in the upcoming betas, it will have all the usual things in desktop too. Do you honestly think that Microsoft would abandon their largest market area, ie. business users for something that only works with tablets?

Ah, slashdot, where giving a honest opinion about Microsoft's product will get you modded down for troll if you say anything good about it.

It already has the normal desktop UI... You can login to either one, which is great as your programs will work for both tablets and desktops. .NET apps should work directly, and native apps are just a recompile away.