I have had quite enough reimagining thank you. Just make it smoother, more reliable, more options, fix bugs please.

It depends on your definition of "our". Maybe try thinking "we geeks" instead of "me and my 319 million dear friends in the glorious US of A".

I applaud you for that, but there is still no need to cut Microsoft slack where they don't deserve it. Which words describe the situation better: 1) "little accident" or 2) "slow motion train wreck"?

I take it you were not particularly impressed by Bill Gates' butt wiggle then?

Unlike IBM they won't pull out of it because they have no lucrative hardware business to fall back and no loyal stable of clients to turn themselves into a service operation. And unlike IBM, who only earned the hatred of a few thousand professionals, Microsoft has earned the hatred of millions and is still working on it.

For Microsoft, this ends at $0 per share.

It's from Microsoft's lack of online success in general. Aquantive was supposed to sell display ads but nobody wanted to pay Microsoft to display their ads. For some reason.

Why do we keep hearing this tired apology over and over again? Aquantive was worth $6.2 billion on the day it was bought then slowly bled bit by bit until it was worth zero. What bled away was its "good will" (aka expected income) as it became increasingly apparent that Microsoft was unable to leverage Aquantive's auction model in the same way that Google had leveraged Applied Semantics.

What do you mean, "remain healthy"? Microsoft has had the corporate equivalent of liver cancer for a dozen years now. Chemo treatment has already started.

No, they lost $6 billion+ on Aquantive. Thanks for playing.

See, the real story here is that Microsoft has been concealing this loss by carrying Aquantive on its books at far more than its real value. They did this in order to make their quarterlies look better than they actually are, therefore support the stock price. Microsoft hoped that the market would then regard this as a one-time expense (when it was really an ongoing loss over a period of years) and thus forgive them. And judging from the aftermarket movement, this strategem has worked perfectly. Whether it is legal is entirely another question. The word "fraud" comes to mind.

Even if Microsoft gets away with this, which they probably will, one fact can't be denied: Microsoft is weakening. The upcoming Windows 8 debacle should put the icing on the cake.

And what is wrong with hating the hateful player that plays the hateful game? Apple has gone out of its way to make itself perfectly hateful so I for one must comply.

Let's take inventory. IPhone 4s. A minor upgrade. Ipad 3. A minor upgrade, and a downgrade in terms of weight, thickness and battery life. New products. None.

OK, I think I can see the pattern now. Apple plans to milk its existing assets for everything they're worth and has no intention of creating new ones. That would cost money, you see.