After all COBOL programmers still get jobs. In the computer industry you either upgrade your skills or off to a legacy programming retirement home. .Net now joins the ranks of COBOL, VB6, Fortran, etc. as well paying but un-exciting jobs maintaining old programs. No one is going to start writing a new exciting program that doesn't run on all of iOS, MacOS, Android, WebOS and even Windows. What's the point, lots of people are doing it, get on board.

I think this shows that a huge percentage of Internet browsing is now coming from iPads, other tablets, iPhones and Android phones. Certainly pays to make your web site browser agnostic these days. I see many web sites that popup messages saying to install run Chrome or Firefox for a better browsing experience.

Good luck collecting that. Wonder if a collections agency would take the job?

This probably isn't a good thing. But it is Facebook's strength. This is really the key reason their application is "sticky" and won't easily be replaced.

AOL failed before the Time-Warner deal because it had no way to dominate broadband like it did dial-up. It beat compuserve and such and pretty much owned the dial-up world (and probably still does). But the game changed Broadband technology became really good, the cable and phone companies deployed it widely and it got adopted widely. AOL was left out in the cold. They knew this and did the TW deal before everything collapsed. Good for them. FaceBook was lucky because it got into the game before MySpace really got critical mass and became ubiquitous. Facebook has reached that status. I'm fully connected to all my family and friends through FB and it would be very hard to move now. This is why things like social media in GMail keep failing, if they don't have a monopoly (in this case in email) then they can't achieve the reach that FB has. Certainly FB isn't perfect and still has a lot of growing pains to go through. But it does have 500 million users and so many people really are connected to all their friends and family this way (and no other way really).

Does this mean MS is killing the Azure platform? Or maybe Bill Gates is returning from the hinterland? Or are employees just leaving one by one until only Steve Balmer is left to turn off the lights?

I think this speaks to the need to not run plug-ins in the browser. To only HTML/JavaScript. Ie don't allow the PDF plugin, don't allow Flash, don't allow Silverlight, don't allow Java Applets. All of these proprietary plug-ins cause all kinds of security problems. They have proven to be a bad idea. I think Steve Jobs is on the right track banning them from the iPhone/iPad.

When I was in Shanghai I could browse the Internet completely freely from my western style hotel. But if I went to an Internet Cafe, browsing was very restricted. They run a very multi-tiered system of censorship. When I was there, BBC news was censored in most places, but not my hotel.

I guess they feel they've gotten enough people locked-in that they can start squeezing the juice out of them. It's why people like to choose an open internet over single vendor proprietary locked in platforms.

We tend to like to hire programmers with 2 years experience. People fresh out of school are too idealistic and will change jobs frequently expecting hitech companies to work like they do in their fantasies. Once they get this out of their system (seems to take 2 years) then you have someone young and bright who will actually stick around for a few years.

Won't Google just enhance their search to give results for the name you are googling along with results for everyone who changed their name to the one you are Googling? Doesn't seem like this will separate you from your past. Best bet is to choose a common name like Tom Brown, Jim Wong, Stephen Smith, etc.

I think the web is browsed much more by devices other than PCs. I would expect IE market share to drop given all the browsing done by Android phones, iPhones, iPads and various other non-PC devices. I suspect this statistic is reflecting the drop in the percentage of web browsing done by Windows based PCs.

The school board my wife teaches in, only accepts marks submitted on floppy disk. The software they use is ancient and they never change their procedures. Schools are having a hard time keeping computers with floppies running for teachers to use.

Look at the GWT blog: http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-ma-no-plugin.html. Here is a webkit browser running Quake II in JavaScript at 60 fps. This is what they will be competing with. Again MS is starting from behind and falling further behind. When I measure Javascript performance in IE9, I can't see a difference form IE8, not sure if this is debug code in IE9 or just the JS I'm using, but so far, not particularly impressed.