The question is what move that would be. To judge by the past, they would, in order of feasibility: -

1. rely on ubiquity of the .ppt format,
2. spread FUD about security issues and TCO,
3. pay bloggers, consultants and analysts to badmouth it,
4. announce the next version of PPT, complete with mock-up screenshots, scaring off investors, then never release it,
5. suffocate it with patent litigation,
6. buy them out and
   1. kill it off,
   2. assimilate it (but not invest into further development, because, hey, no competition again),
7. change office to be incompatible,
8. change IE to be incompatible,
9. change windows to be incompatible.

(Not comprehensive.)

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
(aka: Are you absolutely positive you are not new here?)

Isn't that kind of obvious? They want users to abandon XP. They're already cutting critical security updates because they're "not feasible", whatever that means, thereby violating their own sales promise and legislated minimum warranty period in the EU. If they can't kill XP any other way, you can bet my ass they'll FUD their own product soon.

People seem rather ok with XP, and many are reluctant to get burned by new Windows versions yet again, while Microsoft has a strong interest in getting everyone to use their new systems (and incidentally into "Trusted" Computing to enforce DRM on a hardware level for their new best friends).

If you value control over your own PC, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with free systems now.

I could also be wrong.

If it doesn't matter on the net (where 90% of us consume 90% of their total), then where does it matter? Where could it have more self-aggravating effect?

(Also, I'm inclined to believe he's spelled Shakespeare pretty much everywhere.)

Shouldn't that be, "It hits you when you are most expecting it"?

I'd reckon the unnecessary checks and public panic to have been much more expensive than EUR 300m.

nobody will go to the new internet because it would suck

You're mistaken.

If you tell people the new Internet "2.0" is: -

1. more secure,
2. non-anonymous,
3. childporn- and terrorism-free,
4. well, 2.0
5. etc.

... that will get two-thirds of the population, because they don't want: -

1. to be at risk, whatever that may be,
2. their children to be at risk from online predators,
3. anyone to think they tolerate child pornography or sympathize with terrorists,
4. to be icky 1.0
5. etc.

Then, everyone else will follow because suddenly YouTube 1.0, Facebook 1.0, Twitter 1.0 aren't the places where stuff goes down any longer, you can't send mail to your friend on Internet 2.0, and have to go through three extra verification processes to buy something from Amazon 1.0, while it's true one-click buying from Amazon 2.0, now without a need for any kind of redundant registration.

In the end, your ancient free Internet will be a place where only people go who do have something to hide, at which point they'll shut it down as "a crackdown on organized crime", to protect the general populace.

FTFA:

It's not my intention to shift the blame around though. PA [PulseAudio] and the other layers of our stack should not be viewed as independent parts. If PA uses a new or previously unused feature of the drivers then we need to fix the drivers at the same time.

I'm wondering what the ex-population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki thinks about this.

My requirements were prioritizing, selective downloading, FOSS, a small footprint, and running as service/daemon, and I tried most of the clients on the Wikipedia list that fit these criteria. I liked Deluge most, though I still had a a few problems.

In the end, the problem solved itself when I did the switch from Windows to Linux as my main OS. I use rTorrent, daemonized in screen now and have never looked back. It's very small and has console and (optional) web interfaces.

Oh, and please don't tell anyone I said "FOSS-software".

This just isn't true. I have to invest quite some time to familiarize myself with an application and set my preferences, expecting to be able to use it in the future. With closed software, I never know if can do just that. A closed application may change in a way that makes new versions unusable for me at any time. What's worse, closed source locks me in, forcing me to eat all the little nuisances they decide to inflict upon me.

It might be a decision to abandon certain functionality (not supporting a certain file format any longer, or dropping a lesser used feature to concentrate on a more popular one), it might be a matter of trust (changes in license or privacy agreement; a BitTorrent client getting sold to a company connected to copyright holders or an email client to a company known for data mining), it might be a matter of price (formerly free applications going commercial), it might just be the ever-so-popular dumbing down of the user interface.

My problem is that I can't just stop updating it now, because I depend on bug fixes. In the worst case I need security fixes to keep my system safe at all.

With FOSS-software I would fork from the version that has the functionality I need, trust or can use efficiently, and just keep up with any holes as they appear. I can't do any of that with closed software, effectively barring me from using the app any longer and wasting the time I invested in the application in the first place.

A prominent example of this is uTorrent. When they were sold, a lot of people, me included, would have liked to keep current functionality (it was fairly sufficient). To keep using the old version, though, is to keep any security holes that were discovered in the meantime wide open. I'm sure other people remember a lot of other examples.

I even wondered about this when I started using uTorrent but decided, nah, that guy seems ok, I think I can risk it. I don't think I will make that mistake again. I like to be in control of my applications, not the other way around.