I like it how the /. crowd assumes that behemoth companies like Samsung and Foxconn would just pay protection racket to MS instead of fighting in court if they thought Microsoft were full of shit. But don't you worry Google (via Motorola) are standing up. IANAL but if I interpret the news pieces I am reading correctly it is not going very well for them even though they paid 12 billion for Motorola patents.

This recursion thing is hard!

When I was young we did not call companies with actual products patent trolls.

I don't think the publicity aims to show that Microsoft is relevant or that Foxcon is friendly company. It aims to show Android OEMs that they must pay when Microsoft visits them.

Simplest explanation (and therefore most likely to be correct) is that they were hiding. Until yesterday's leak this was all confidential and they did not want to leak information via user agent stats.

To be honest this was incredibly smooth launch. Servers were up and running fast and everything seems fine except for the achievement service that died. BTW I am pretty sure WoW does not share infrastructure except maybe login servers which were never the bottleneck for WoW. Did it ever happen to you that you could not play another game due to WoW overloading the servers?

50% for SC2 WoL according to the stats. However it is the multiplayer that boosts the IP and interest in the game. There is high chance that the IP would be dead or transformed into something else (WarCraft to World of WarCraft) if it was not for the multiplayer.

Also note that Blizzard went away from the idea that the campaign is a tutorial for the multiplayer. The units in the campaign are quite different. They use other means to train the player like challenge missions and special multiplayer games (with rocks blocking the ways so you could not be rushed, etc.).

Well I play random but if I was terran I would gladly pay 40 EUR for the medivac boost. I believe it is the most powerful change/addition to any race.

Do you happen to be ex-Blizzard's Rob Simpson?

I doubt balancing costs that much. It certainly costs time but it does not require a great number of people working on it. The players are doing the testing and a few people are watching the result and tweaking the game. Also I believe SC2 would be more expensive if split because many people would only buy the multiplayer. In effect the multiplayer part is subsidizing the single player.

First of all, no it won't. Second if Windows Store does have the power to kill Steam on Windows then Linux won't save Steam.

They are doing this for their console. Everything else is P.R.

The "horror show that is Windows 8" has over 9% in the same survey :)

You realize Windows Phone and Windows are different operating systems right?

You do know that Surface is not a phone and runs different operating system from Windows Phone devices right?