It's funny that Ubuntu Edge is trying this all over again, with a phone that can run desktop Linux.

This seems to be a misconception fueled by all the WP ads out there. Your home screen can be however you like it, your tiles don't have to form a rainbow and flip every second. I use a Windows Phone and I am perfectly happy with it, my home screen is simple and updates automatically to display notifications, weather and the latest headlines. The beauty of WP is that everyone's home screen is his/her own, so it's hard to pick up a friend's phone and appreciate the utility of the home screen. Try using one for a few days, customize the home screen, and see how you like it.

Honestly, if they hadn't put the title in the trailers, I couldn't have told them apart.

Works exactly the same way it did in Windows 7 -- right-click on taskbar and choose "Show windows side by side".

Mark Zuckerberg must have inherited Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, since nobody seems to have brought up the fact that Facebook Home is essentially a blatant rip-off of Windows Phone. Put people before apps? Facebook photos on the lock screen? Status updates on the home screen? Integrated Facebook chat? Windows Phone has been doing these for years now.

Flash may be crap now but for a long time, it (and Shockwave before it) was the only practical way of displaying interactive multimedia content in the browser.

Server-side and client-side validation serve different purposes. Server-side validation is important for security reasons, but client-side validation provides for a better user experience by identifying errors right away instead of waiting to submit and refresh the page.

At least this one didn't reload the entire page for each slide.

You can only call the Apple experience "unified" as long as you stay within their walled garden. Microsoft is far better when it comes to open standards (DLNA vs. AirPlay) and third-party integration (People hub in Win8 / WP).

I can't remember the last time I actually used the Start menu as a "menu". Ever since Windows 7 came out, I've pinned my most frequently used programs to the taskbar, and I only ever used the Start menu as a search bar.

When I switched to Windows 8, I initially thought I might miss the Start menu, but after several months of use, I have no complaints. I mostly use the desktop mode; I can still pin stuff to the taskbar, I can search for stuff in the exact same way (hit the Start key and type to search), and I can hit the Start key to glance at live tiles (weather, stocks etc.)

Firefox's search bookmarks make it all the more easier to skip search engines and search directly on another site. I have search bookmarks set up for Wikipedia, Youtube and Amazon, which together cover most of my searching needs.

Isn't this the same thing people said about MySpace back then?

There is no lack of talent in most large companies. But often this talent is concentrated in the lower levels of the company, and the drain begins as soon as they realize that the people at the top have no clue what they're doing. A lot of this talent then moves to smaller companies, some of which eventually succeed and become large companies. Rinse and repeat. This happens all the time in the tech industry.

There is a Linux market, just not sure anyone knows it.

I'm fairly certain that game developers "know" that a Linux market exists, just that it's too small a market for them to bother. And since Wine can already run most games just fine, why would they put effort into porting it when it already works for free?

Backwards compatibility used to be one of Microsoft's big things, but not on mobile.

It still is. WP8 will run existing WP7 apps just fine.