They got the word Microsoft into millions of home and unlike with their home PC, made it into a positive experience. Any money that might have been lost was made up for by the marketing gains. When people think XBox, they think Microsoft and successful product--two words that don't usually go together. That's worth any price Microsoft may have paid for the experience. Considering how much Xbox charges you for everything and everything, it certainly takes an extraordinary level of incompetence to lose money on something like that.

So they get rid of their most successful consumer product.... the thing that puts the word "Microsoft" in people's houses? That makes sense--typical MBA driven, stupid, short sighted decision that would be so Microsoft. I'd love for Google to buy Xbox. They would do some pretty cool things with that. Microsoft would never sell to them. Samsung, maybe? They'd love to get a bigger piece of the living room, and they might do some cool things with it!

And yet, they are still making gobs of money. In fact, they are more profitable than ever. Moves like this don't really help anything.. not even the bottom line, since the massive cuts crush morale and limit the ability of the company to innovate to keep ahead of the competition.

The Timex Data Link USB was a very nice smartwatch for it's day (i.e. 5 years ago). It was even programmable, if you could decipher their bizarre assembly language and could fit your app in 900 bytes (yes, bytes) or less.

A Dick Tracy speakerphone feature... massively important for those who charge their phone a lot and sadly missing from all but Samsung devices. An open API and ease of programmability is also nice. Pebble has really hit the moon on that one. Some of the apps people have come up with have been simply amazing. Unfortunately, It will be interesting to see how Android wear stacks up. It's a shame that only Pebble is going with the "minimalist" approach with an old fashioned, low power LCD screen. There's no need for high res on a watch, especially when it will be used outside in the sun a lot.

They ruled unanimously against the NFL in their antitrust suit. This SCOTUS is very business friendly, but they aren't monolithic.

The original Palm devices were definitely tough as nails. My original Palm Pilot Pro was put through the ringer and anded up looking like my dog had chewed it, but it still worked like a charm. Unfortunately, I traded it in for $50 on a Palm Zire 31 color. That unit's digitizer failed within a couple of years. Very disappointing.

Yeah, if I recall there was a similar uproar about the post office using zip codes around that time, too...

Yes, I know. .NET is big, yet Microsoft has made it clear that they are going in a different direction. They haven't abandoned .NET yet, but they aren't going to be devoting a lot of resources to it either as they are pushing the RT and Azure stuff now.

Visual Basic developers didn't like going to .NET, either, but Microsoft left them out in the cold, too.

I think we're in agreement here. I was trying to object to the original author's argument that the BSD license was more "free" than the GPL. If I miscommunicated, I apologize.

Their whole .NET strategy seems to have been, "Well, Java's popular now, so I guess we better do bytecode, too," even though there was no compelling reason to do so. Non-Intel Windows machines were long gone, so there was no reason for Windows application portability. Now that they have a good reason to make applications hardware independent, they abandon the .NET thing that they pushed so hard on everyone. It's simply bizarre.

.NET was cross platform--at least cross hardware. Yes, it was Windows-only, but a .NET application could run on an ARM machine or any other hardware that might run windows, since .NET was hardware independent byte code. Yes, you were still stuck on some form of Windows OS to use it, but now that they are selling windows on both ARM and Intel, it would seem to behoove them to support a portable hardware application strategy, yet they have essentially abandoned it.

By "even more liberal", you mean less free, since BSD allows anyone to essentially take code for their own personal use without giving anything back to the project (like Apple using the BSD kernel to make lots of money, but not allowing the BSD folk any access to the Apple code that interacted with it).

Windows was cheap. For most people it appeared to be "free". A lot of their stuff seemed pricey at the time, but they were always cheaper than their competition. SQL Server cost less than Oracle. IIS cost less than Netscape Web Server. Windows Mobile cost less than Palm. Visual C cost less than Borland. Office cost less than Word Perfect. Mcrtosoft's pricing is what drove a lot of these guys out of business. Microsoft's products were cheaper quality-wise, too, which is why they have such a terrible reputation.