The EU didn't just "levy" a fine, Microsoft were found guilty in a court of law and spent years appealing and then refusing to comply with the judgement leading to their fine being massively increased.

You are mistaken.

Because that worked out so well for Steve Jobs.

I hate to break it to you but web apps kickstarted the neo-mainframe movement because everyone having their own PC turned into an admin nightmare. Apple and Google have given the same thing to people who don't want to fight with their computer all the time.

It's OK when rich people move to Turkey and buy up all the property. It's not okay when ordinary Turks want to come here to earn the extra money they need to afford to house their families after the property boom sent housing costs soaring.

Why use three syllables when 35 will do.

There are a lot of enterprise customers wondering who they can go to now that Blackberry have faded away. That's where WinPhone is going to shine unless the other 2 ecosystems start being able to integrate seamlessly with things like Active Directory and Exchange and the plethora of third-party Windows-only software.

It's pretty easy to block phone signals.

But but they're good now honest! Most of the apologists here don't know and usually aren't interested in the history and just assume it's jealousy or just about IE being the default browser.

Apple aren't the only company who make Thunderbolt and it's a patented Intel technology anyway.

Speaking as a former COBOL programmer who did Y2K work you really don't know that you've got it good. Some of that code was a vile mess of hacks, commented code , blocks of code that couldn't be touched on case they broke so had to be coded around. Shit code can be written without frameworks and in my experience more often is, due to the wheel being reinvented repeatedly and badly. The good old days never existed and personally I'm far happier writing C# in Visual Studio for SMEs than I ever was trying to debug some horrendous code written by a moron 30 years ago that some bank utterly depends on and which is probably still in use now 10 years after I escaped.

Funny but my skills in C# are far more valuable than my COBOL skills thanks to all the mainframe COBOL work being outsourced to India because people like me were too expensive.

It's also pretty hard to fight back when the other side is so much better armed than you. A bunch of NRA members with assault rifles won't last long against tanks and fighter jets without outside support and the most powerful of the US' enemies are too far away to give any meaningful support and taking that support would immediately lose any popular support you might get.

"stan o'neil" site:bbc.co.uk returns the article. This is all hysterical bullshit.

Some of the most expensive IT failures in history have come from contracting it out to the amazingly efficient do no wrong private sector.