OS/2 was so poorly designed that IBM was already doing a major rewrite in the mid-1990s. (WorkplaceOS, it failed.)

Sorry, but this still seems like the myopic POV of someone trying to squeeze every last cycle out of his Pentium. The operating systems that survived were the ones which didn't skimp on the fundamentals and were designed for the future: NextStep/OSX, NT, and Linux.

From a pure 'computing' perspective, I'd agree. However, there were huge advances in commodification, manufacturing scale, and user adoption. I'm not sure where we'd be without that monopolistic "dark age" which pushed computers into the hands of billions. I don't think we would have necessarily gotten here had we stuck with the grotesque incompatibility of the 1980s.

OS/2 -- aka "Half an operating system".

Both your examples had some interesting ideas with their UIs. But they were both also extremely crippled to get them to run acceptably on the limited hardware of the eras. Now that you can run full-fledged Unix OS on your cellphone, it's hard to shed a tear for stuff that was obsolete almost on arrival.

Not to mention that the consumer electronic people insisted on interlaced resolutions (1080i), that were practically obsolete by the time HDTV actually rolled out to the mass market.

The angst over XP's DRM didn't die down that quickly, especially at places like Slashdot. Remember when Microsoft banned the one particular corporate key every other pirate was using? Or when they snuck some new form of activation through Windows Update? Eventually it was cracked wide-open, but people were moaning about it for years.

On that note, Microsoft had secret easter eggs in their BASIC interpreter:

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 (bonus confirmation by Bill Gates in the comments)

No problem, just lobby your University to raise your tuition in order to build a special network where you can discuss Star Trek in peace. ... Oh wait, you're no longer a University student? Well, there's this other service where you can discuss Star Trek for $1 per minute.

That's obviously not his concern. Google offers free analytics (previously an expensive service) because they can use his traffic to advertise to his users, based on his own site's content. If you happen to be against the whole idea of ad-supported sites, it's kinda silly to hand over user behavior data to an advertising company.

Hey, I think we finally found the guy who bought a Slashdot Cruiser.

> ...doesn't understand how the Internet works.

The other aspect of this is that if you block ads, you drop out of Google/Doubleclick's statistics, and your traffic just fades into the noise level along with the bots. In most cases, nobody will ever know what you're interested in looking at, or that you visited at all.

But realistically, unless you're YouTube or someone, the cost of hosting/bandwidth is insignificant relative to the other costs. Junk traffic is just part of the cost of doing business. The bigger issue is that people will produce less content that you like (and yes techies already have this reputation).

Sorry, that was never the case. Even their various BASICs had OEM discount pricing.

If you look at Apple's revenues, they barely make any money off their store. The only way that will change is if people start using these stores to deliver real applications instead of 99 cents casual games. Just because Valve might be a little vulnerable on the games side does not mean it's going to be a huge revenue stream for MS.

You do have a point about adoption though. MS makes most of their money from OEMs and corporate licenses. However, it was the "PC enthusiast" home builder-type guy who effectively FUDed Vista to death. So it does make sense to try to market directly to those (us) people, because that's where the word-of-mouth comes from. (And in typical MS fashion, it's rather hamhanded.)

Sure, Apple is fundamentally very solid. However, there's tons of negative hype about Windows 8 going on in various investor forums, specifically regarding Apple, so I do think that's a big factor in the recent runup. (Along with iphone 5 anticipation.)

And some of that is "real"; specifically there's going to be a battle for enterprise tablet adoption between iPad and MS Surface-type hardware, which imo Apple has a very good chance of winning.

It doesn't even require any nefarious motives, MS simply finally woke up and realized their was a huge disparity between their retail prices and the far lower volume prices. If Dell is only paying $30 a copy, why were they even trying to get $300 from joe home builder? It was stupid and they finally figured it out.

Not to mention that Microsoft's old price sheet literally dates back to the 1980s and OS/2. People used to pay $300 for Windows NT Workstation and install it on their $2500 PC, pretty good deal compared to Unix, eh? But it's 2012 now and nobody is paying that kind of money to install an OS on their $400 laptop.

Actually IMO it's more "Only in the last few week, investors realized Windows 8 is going to bomb hard". (Semi regretfully, if I cared about day-trading, predictable money could have been made.)