In golf, there is a term for golfers that aim to get around the course in three (lost balls) and don't replace divots properly. They're called coarse golfers. "Comments don't matter" is the attitude of a coarse programmer.

Any fool can make a computer do what he wants. Professional programmers are communicating with other programmers via the code. Good comments aid that immeasurably, but because your attitude is prevalent they are also rare.

I'll quote myself:

Nokia's mistake was not jumping on a bandwagon. The mistake was abandoning its core strengths in order to fight a perceived enemy on the enemy's own terms in the enemy's home ground.

Almost right.

Before Elop, Nokia's strategy was massive diversification: a phone for every segment in every market. Elop, like Ballmer, became hypnotised by Apple's success in the anglophone markets. Elop decided he had to compete with Apple, in Apple's home market, using Apple's strategy, and that everything had to be sacrificed to this idea. So hypnotised was he that he completely ignored the two most important facts of Nokia's existence: that Nokia Mobile's biggest markets were in Eurasia, and that the big growth markets in mobile are in Asia.

Thanks to his obsession. Elop has systematically crippled Nokia Mobile's ability to compete in its key markets by removing product lines. Now it's left with S40 dumbphones, Windows 7, and very little else.

None of those things require scientific breakthroughs. The technologies already exist.

What's stopping us doing those simple things? Politics: corruption, caprice, ideology, handouts to special interest groups, denying ownership rights in land, failure to regulate lenders (120% p.a. interest anyone? Become a poor farmer in rural Bihar), failure to make elemetary investments in roads, water management, health and education. Most of the problems are in "third world" countries themselves, but Europe and North America sure don't help.

We could do those five things now, if our political elites possessed enlightened self-interest.

Now there would be a breakthrough.

Occasionally, an AC says something sensible. Yes! Reform the )(*@#(* patent system!

Meh, what's second prize?

Microsoft's problem is exactly that it has bought into this "threat of the iPhone" meme.

Microsoft and Apple have different markets and different sales channels. By trying to compete with Apple, Microsoft is exchanging a position of dominance in enterprise "productivity" computing for one of abject weakness in consumer/mobile/fashion computing. In so doing, it is alienating its partners and customers even more than usually.

Sure, enterprise computing is a mature market, and it's not possible to continue double-digit growth in it any more. Big deal. Are electricity utilities reinventing themselves as iOS app developers? No; they are making good money in a static to declining market. That's the mature, high-return, low-risk strategy.

Microsoft needs to ignore Apple; if it doesn't, lawyers will be getting fat off aggrieved shareholders.

Time was when Microsoft's gross profit ratio was about two thirds, not one third. Hmm.