You have a point, but the problem with what you are saying is that all of the examples you give had increasing market share with each version and also made money.

You must not remember WordPerfect 5.0. That version had a lot to do with the rapidly growing popularity of Microsoft Word in the early 90's.

It wouldn't surprise me if he's right about this. I have a lot of friends who work for Microsoft in various divisions and I can say without a doubt that the rank and file of Microsoft considers Windows Mobile to be an embarrassment. They've done a piss-poor job with the platform for years now and everyone knows it.

I think Microsoft is over the line with this campaign from a legal standpoint and will get the smackdown from the FTC.
Fromt the STATEMENT OF POLICY REGARDING COMPARATIVE ADVERTISING http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/policystmt/ad-compare.htm.

"The Commission has supported the use of brand comparisons where the bases of comparison are clearly identified. Comparative advertising, when truthful and non-deceptive, is a source of important information to consumers and assists them in making rational purchase decisions."

If the page "Clearly Identifies" the basis of the comparison, I don't see it.

And

"Some industry codes which prohibit practices such as "disparagement," "disparagement of competitors," "improper disparagement," "unfairly attacking," "discrediting," may operate as a restriction on comparative advertising. The Commission has previously held that disparaging advertising is permissible so long as it is truthful and not deceptive."

As many others have pointed out, several of the claims are, to put it generously, a stretch.

It doesn't render correctly with Chrome either.

Those who have pointed out that many companies still use earlier versions of IE and will resist change should know that Microsoft has stated that the Office 2010 Web bits, SharePoint, and the browser enabled client applications like Word, will support FireFox.

Office 2010 will not support the older versions of IE. I'm not sure if older includes IE 7, but it does include IE 6.

It doesn't look like Microsoft cares very much about trying to maintain IE's market share, and there is lots of speculation that IE 8 is the end of the line for the current rendering engine. This makes sense as it is clearly as unwieldy for them as it is for everyone else. That's why the competition gets features out so much more quickly. The IE code base is almost 15 years old.

Installed it to have a look and it made itself my default browser without asking. Unforgivable. Banished.

I wish I had points to mod you up. That is terrific.
Harlan Ellison is a douche bag. I'd have paid to see that.

If he is talking about existing PC's then I agree. My gut tells me that most regular people never upgrade their operating system anyway.

If he is talking about businesses making the move when they replace equipment then I suspect he is quite wrong. Most businesses have avoided Vista not because they love XP, but because Vista has issues and requires beefy hardware. Windows 7 has two things going for it in this regard.

The first is that it does seem to be quite an improvement over Vista. I've used it continuously for the past three weeks and I quite like it. I do not like Vista. The Vista shell pisses me off for many different reasons that I won't go into here. Windows 7 fixes all of my little pet peeves and I really like the new window manager.

The second is that what was beefy expensive hardware when Vista shipped is now standard kit and quite inexpensive. Businesses in the U.S. can depreciate computers over five years. Any businesses PC purchased before 2005 will have fully depreciated by the time Windows 7 is an option and companies will be upgrading to new machines. A high-end computer purchased in 2005 or earlier probably did a terrible job running Vista. Most entry-level computers purchased in 2007-2008 to replace PCs purchased in 2002-2003 will run Windows 7 just fine.

Windows 7 will see significant uptake in businesses compared to Vista.

What you fail to grasp is that the 7th dimension works like quantum sticky tape to hold you in place relative to the things around you as you travel through time. So, you don't really need a space ship because of the relativistic affects of the items around you relative to each other pulling you along. Plus there's the whole inertia thing which requires you to go 88 miles an hour exactly so you always wind up where you started whether you go forward or backward. Try it yourself by drawing two 8's. On is for space space and the other one is for time space.

Also, don't forget that the velocity has to be in miles per hour, because the metric system is gay.

DUH!

Then again, you aren't running Windows. So Xen, VMWare, etc...

Many people enjoy virtual machines for this sort of thing, and you can get Virtual PC for free. Admittedly, not the same as a live CD, but hardly difficult.

What an awful summary!

The $/hour numbers and the homework example in the patent application are both simply illustrations. What the application is about is a method of creating, provisioning, and metering, and charging for a bundled unit of specific functionality within a cloud infrastructure. As I said in a previous post, I think they are too similar to EC2.

On the other hand, this sort of thing is a key enabler to any sort of broad SaaS infrastructure and people will use these services if the price is right. I just move several sites onto EC2 at a rate of ~$0.13/hr. For around $1100 a year I get a good infrastructure for less than what the server with no software and no connectivity would cost and I can make it bigger or turn it off whenever I want. Near as I can tell, the difference here is that instead of buying the power as a configured server instance, you are buying a configured service instance. This is a subtle, but important, difference. (But to my mind not a novel one).

So assuming they have some implementation to back up the patent application, I'm glad Microsoft is working on this because it's a necessary part of the infrastructure.

The historical stupidity of the USPTO not withstanding, I'd guess that this application as written is DOA.

I'm sure there is other prior art out there, but having just read the application, it sounds almost exactly like Amazon EC2. You buy different computing configurations (hardware and software) from a menu of choices and then get charged a metered rate based on your choice. The only difference I see here is that this application has you pay up front and then draw down the time instead of paying as you go. That isn't a novel difference.