Slashdotters may not care, but I guarantee your average computer user will care, and that's why it's news. People don't like it when companies drive vans around their neighborhoods collecting their passwords and such. It's a violation of trust and an issue of questionable ethics. Either Google is bad for approving of it, or they're bad for having such poor management structure and clueless engineering that they don't even notice it going on for two years.

To quote Mike Daisey: "Do you really think they didn't know?"

Replace Google with some popular foe. If Microsoft had done it, then would you care? What if it had been Facebook or Sony? Probably, you'd be ranting about the fact that a corporation can get away with a measly fine for something that would likely land you in jail for "hacking".

Is a content license really required to store files? I think you mean that they need to be allowed to do all those things to provide context-sensitive advertising.

This is why I don't use any cloud services for file storage. Though one could reasonably argue that giving Google, the biggest internet company in the world, a license to your content has larger ramifications than giving one to Dropbox or even Microsoft.

The question is why Slashdot hasn't posted anything about that controversy but instead chose to post about Chrome OS, which nobody uses or cares about. In fact, there's been a lot of shady, selective coverage in the last 12 months that ignores stories that are huge on the rest of the web but happen to be negative toward entities that are popular among Slashdot commenters.

Google has a long track record of taking good care of my data.

This is the same company that sniffed neighborhood wifi data, stored it in an indexed database for two years, and then suddenly realized their "accident" when German investigators began probing.

Never recording any data anywhere would be "safer", in the same way that never leaving my house would make it less likely that I would contract an illness.

There is a line, and the question is whether or not you're okay with sweeping it toward the side of making money for advertising companies or toward the privacy and respect of users.

Cheering for Google winning patent lawsuits while criticizing competitors for trying to win patent lawsuits is an insane double standard. Has the discussion really been reduced to such blind fanboyism? You're portraying Google for being a champion of open standards even as they ship the closed source Flash plugin in Chrome and support MP3 and AAC audio playback, which are just as patent-encumbered as H.264.

What Google is brilliant at is being no different from their competitors yet convincing techies to side with them through populist rhetoric about openness. If Google was actually open, you'd be able to download the source code for the search engine.

You're contradicting your own arguments. If Windows RT lacks key enterprise tools because it's targeted at consumers, why would it have "a whole host of enterprise features", as you put it?

The Xbox 360 can't join domains because there isn't enterprise demand for a game console. Let's not be silly by comparing things that aren't equivalent. iOS devices currently have a large enterprise presence, which is normally Microsoft's area of the market.

There's more to enterprise support than C algorithms. Windows RT doesn't support third-party Win32 applications, so clearly, significant portions of Windows didn't survive the transition to ARM. The development and testing of WinRT-based administration and deployment tools to manage a collection of enterprise Windows 8 tablets requires time and effort that, I believe, Microsoft didn't have time to implement.

Apple claimed last October that 93% of Fortune 500 companies are testing and deploying iOS devices. Remember that Microsoft killed the Courier tablet project because it didn't interface with Office, so it's really difficult to believe that they'd intentionally hand Apple the enterprise market on a silver platter.

As willing as I am to accept the sample size of "people negRo_slim on Slashdot knows", I think I'll trust industry data:

iPad Enterprise Adoption Up To 80% In Fortune 100

But the iPad has enterprise features and is seeing increased adoption in that section of the market. It already has over 80% adoption in Fortune 100 companies according to Network World and is part of an overall trend in IT toward letting employees use what they want rather than company-issued devices like the Blackberry. Microsoft would most certainly be aware of this, but I think they just didn't have the time to address it.

Microsoft has always had a strong enterprise relationship, so it's more likely that the lack of IT features is due to a rushed release schedule rather than sales strategy, especially considering that the iPad has been seeing rising enterprise adoption rates, which Microsoft is almost certainly aware of. Microsoft just didn't have a choice, because they're so far behind in the tablet market that they needed to release something at all costs.

Microsoft ran out of time years ago. The iPad has completely taken over the tablet industry; even Android hasn't yet found any footing there without the carrier infrastructure that helped it to compete with the iPhone in the smartphone industry. Worse yet for Microsoft, iPads now outsell the entire desktop PC industry.

But if you've followed Windows 8 development, you'll already have the impression that the whole thing was rushed. Poor design decisions exposed in the preview releases were ignored because the product was due for release this year, come hell or high water. Microsoft is afraid and knows that the era of the PC is over, and that smartphones and tablets--aka, appliance computing--is the new paradigm for mainstream computing. And Windows won't be there.

GreatBunzinni:

Dude, you're still doing this? I don't care what bonch's signature is. Your trolling got me modded down for praising an Android tablet. So that's what I put in my sig since I wasn't able to post. My karma was totaled for no reason, so I won't be posting regularly anymore. This site totally sucks now because of all the trolling.

I'm getting sick of responding to these. I am not any of the 14 accounts you claim I am. Your past trolling has already gotten me modded down so harshly that my karma is -1, so I've stopped regularly posting. Now you're getting modded up by other people for this shit? I'm taking advantage of the new flagging feature and reporting your post. This is organized corruption of the moderation system.