It's not the OS or hardware that matters. It is traffic, because visitors are targets ripe for advertising.

Mobile numbers will eventually be half of traffic on some sites. They're already 25 to 30% in some (FB, for instance). Marketers are the same guys known to benefit from abysmally small fractions for their thousands of ad impressions. They must be pretty sensitive to small percentages and fractions of a percent. So again, 25 or 30%? When your ads CANNOT spew flash at one in four or five visitors, you have to go back to the drawing board and wonder if investments and ad delivery policies needs to be rethought.

They have to decide if your shovelware is more effective delivered to you via bundling agreements with Dell (where some uninstall or decrapifier script is an easy fix), or if it's a safer ROI to buy a few unremovable app slots on Samsung phones. Here is the kicker: this paragraph is a bit more impactful when you realize how many NEW PCs you buy every year in a home this day and age, per capita... versus how many cellphones it is COOL to buy YEAR after YEAR, sometimes at twice the price of a new PC ($300 decent desktop PCs vs $700 list price for a new Galaxy S 4)

Replying to myself:
We need to coin a new Godwin's type of law
How quickly can we bring up NSA-like involvement in some random online thread?
I dub thee "Snowden's Law"

You really think it's their fault? Common sense has never been too strong when compared to status quo and people follow by lead. Thankfully, that helped us win some battles, in the past. After all, people now know about firefox and Ubuntu without being geeks themselves. Because they followed a geek trend that eventually became mainstream.

But trends are exactly what all big and small companies are following now. You can't sign up to Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail without being asked for a cellphone number. Since that is so normal, Facebook, Whatsapp and probably many others I haven't been asked to help with, are already making it a norm. My mother is mad that her FB App autofills her number on the login screen.

Since it has become the norm to be asked, people sooner or later give in. Or didn't most of us realize that RealName started out just like this, and yet few non-geeks ever obfuscate it on their Facebook and G+ profiles?
Ultimately, the wise man is he who follows common sense despite trends, percentages and friendly pressures. But online nobody is truly wise with the NSA listening in.

Funny thought: Phone numbers are nothing --they're in the phonebook after all...
a really bad day for the web is the day some Dark Snowden comes to release some exploit with even a percent of the treasure trove of data that governments themselves have at their disposal.

In a perfect world where piracy is zero, all people who will not pay for Photoshop are forced to use GIMP and other alternatives, or just stay out of the race. The problem in our world is few people see piracy as a problem and make statements such as this as if Adobe's boxes were all marked "MSRP: $0" instead of $600 or $1000 for the non-student versions. Just skip this post if you advocate otherwise. I don't want your reasons.

If you basically have no barriers to acquiring Photoshop, then sadly there's no reason to "invest" on the less developed product, even if it is ALSO free.

Adobe and Microsoft both know that piracy tends to drive adoption out of increased eyeballs on the de-facto tools. This hurts the number of developers who would otherwise improve Gimp out of sheer need. We have Linux today because someone in the nineties wanted a free alternative. Someone like that living in today's pirate friendly world would have few reasons to bother working with others, when he can just shut up and torrent multi-thousand dollar software.

Does all that free work up on deviantart get made with paid copies of Photoshop, especially for broke amateurs contributing from humble third-world countries? nobody there buys personal software.

If you're one of us who won't pirate, you'll find the problem. Just by the power of numbers, intentional or unknowing free-loaders *dictate* practices for everyone. It's free for them to send you their work in PSD format, or ppt and docx for Windows office work, so they'll do it and assume you have the reader for free on your machine.

Not so much a problem for geeks who know of Openoffice, Gimp or the free converters online, but things get to the point where you have random computer illiterate friends expecting you to have those installed on your mother's machine to read some random forward, and think YOU are the one with the problem for not having pirated. But most of them are clueless that their PC is "fine" because someone else skirted paying hundreds of dollars for Office and other software. They just assume all PC's can read all files and that yours is broken. They're driving up the pressure for others to pay for Office and Photoshop. More realistically, it's just more pressure to pirate!

And there are a few hardware-assisted breakthroughs thanks to a freshly designed Android mentality. We probably never stopped to think 10 years ago how much shareware, paid or even free software suffered due to the *fragmentation* presented by wintel PC *diversity*

I just realized this: un-needed smartphone peripherals starting with the iPhone and Android era gave birth to a multimedia 2.0... different from the nineties' version in that there are no more drivers, sound cards, CD roms, modems, cameras and microphones to install.

Also, simplified file management and transfers to others (no need for CD burning or shady Windows shares if you have Wifi, certain apps or just bluetooth. For better or worse. It is saddening the knowledge contrast in proficient users who only can upload photos from phone GUIs, but get teary-eyed when you show remind them the 5000+ picture archive on the Windows PC won't attach itself to their emails or flat to Facebook. People do NOT want to have to deal with file sizes, folder locations AND the concept of Windowed desktops when they have an emergency to share with the world.

Back on point, devs gave us unexpected products that PCs and laptops equipped with similar hardware still have no binaries for. Things like personal barcode scanning, radio song identification, GPS and compass-assisted augmented reality that lets you
* avoid paying 100+ USD minimum for dying GPS devices
* find where you parked
* track down miles walked for personal exercise efforts
* overlay star and planet information over the night sky as you point the camera
* translate some signs on the fly

Hybrid machines would mean some hardware changes that might spur a new age of desktop based software that you can distribute for Windows Stores.

I used to find comfort in that same thought, but the techdirt link in the GP post has a comment that ups our healthy paranoia. Even with the "battery" off we should recall there's a secondary battery not maintained by the user, which may or may not power nefarious means (clock tick battery and settings, but why not a cell tower ping? GPS is expensive, but 1 and 2G can be pretty cheap power-wise)

Consider that a recent /. article said wireless chips are getting even smaller, so air-gapping "legal" interfaces that we know doesn't mean we're safe from an untrusted device. And they are ALL untrusted nowadays. I heard here that the very first Amazon-branded e-reader had a little-known always-on internet connection. Supposedly it was a low speed blackbox paid for by Amazon where you could do simple things like read wikipedia articles. That's scary because people didn't talk about it, and because if Amazon does it publicly, who's to forbid American phones from connecting to government-controlled blackbox spectrum at random intervals and chat away?

You can never be too paranoid. I caved in and looked up what the Russian "facebook" alternative is some hours ago (yeah, local ISP spying and whatever is still a problem, but at least there's no worry about US ad companies running the show and piping every single post without court orders.) No need to mention the name, because it lost the game quickly: There was a signup box, and a "sign-in with Facebook" button. So our tendrils are all over the place. If they have FB code on their site even being a competitor, then what else do they exchange with the "enemy"?

Tell that to geocities content. Not only does it live on in japan [since they shut down their english presence] but I've seen clones that still hold the space I made more than ten years ago. Look up "oocities".

Ages: 99, 91 and 90-something from your own sample.
No disrespect meant: I'm starting to notice a generational pattern here ; )

It is a shame that today's middle aged and youths regard the horoscope sections more highly for entertainment. Sudoku itself isn't my thing, but I recall it WAS brainy and extremely popular. They don't require actual culture or dictionary lookups to solve (just math skills). From what I recall back in 2007 - late 2009, I'd see lots on solvers on the way to work.

They were all gone at some point between 2010 and late 2011 while I was out of the workforce. Mobile happened!
You'd think we'd be seeing a transfer from paper to Sudoku apps, but when people aren't passively reading, it's all Bejeweled, Angry birds and other games, Facebook, email and texts. I doubt these will be pushing back Alzheimer's.

OK, devil's advocate here:
Marketing and commerce helps the government, despite all the annoyance we the consumers get.
This resolves into revenue that the government well know they can tax at some point.

Publicly admitting to spying by doing us a public service like you describe would be great, but doesn't help them right now. Look at the NSA's name. Since what they're doing is covert anyway, they can play the "Commerce is not our jurisdiction because Security and not Commerce is part of our name."

At the same time, the boss (government) can just play innocent even though it COULD put the data to good use. Again, if you follow the money, you'll see little motive in cutting money flow by shutting down telemarketers. It's not black and white like can-spam, though. Telemarketing calls tend to be legit, and just take advantage of liberal sharing policies from businesses you already trust [because subtle fine print always allows partners and affiliates to get data unless you opt out by call or mail, which is a bother], as well as loopholes.

Here is a little known technicalities about version-itis: Back in the days of IE6 on Windows, the powers that be decided that IE5 would be the last version of the browser on Macs. Likely they didn't feel like supporting [and putting up with APIs from] the competition. *

Safari 5 for Windows is following in the same steps. It's two years out of date, behind Safari 7. Yet iTunes bugs Windows users with the latest revenue-increasing upgrades despite the platform gap. The official Safari 5 for Windows binaries were relegated to cumbersome search item out of dozens of others in the support subdomain with no apologies or even footnotes.
I have little sympathy for Apple's short support cycles starting with their iMac-era financial rebirth. iOS OTA updates seem to be the exception rather than norm.

* At some point around 2005 or so, the IE5-for mac download site at Microsoft stopped linking the software, actually encouraging users to get alternative browsers. Moment of silence for the likes of iCab, Netscape and Camino, whose names we used to respect but have forgotten in the wake of Webkit^W safari, Opera, Firefox and eventually Chrome.

There is a whole other industry out there that measures by a completely different method than we're used to, but as usual, tech doesn't define trends. Smart salesmen do.

But let's think like consumers for five minutes, and accept a bit of tongue-in-cheek realism.
Not as easy as you think to recall 2160p to ask to see one at the store to... BUY it! ;-)

* how many non-zero numbers do I have to recall, and in what order did they go, again?
* what do I do if see the 720 and 1080 stickers, but want to ask if they carry that OTHER size that I only know to be in some way higher?
* 1080 is only 3 syllables. How many in 2160 again?

What will matter for public uptake in the long run is extremelly silly, but ...mark my words:
1) It's just 2 Syllables!!!!!111!!*
2) EASY on the consumer:

Don't laymen need some simple way to figure out how much [marginally] better those 1080 whatchamacallit numbers on all the boxes are than their current 720 screen? It's like we're back in the nineties simply counting X's for CD reader speeds 2X, 4X, 16X, 20X, etc. No more awkwardness when the salesman shows 'em the number and the educated consumer can't do long division in his head.

For those who don't get the reference, Peggy isn't a female. Here's one I like... sooo true!

Think of the implications this can have for us with the NSA bundling it. I wouldn't be surprised if this similar tech is already snooping on us.
No amount of de-wiring the obvious attack points will help. Seriously, the world is getting extremely inconvenient to live in when it comes to computing we can trust.

Skinning fills some kind of primal need to stand out and put your personal brand on something. I really feel sorry for those guys who just keep their default wallpapers, but there are lots nowadays. I recall back when Windows 95 and 98 Plus! theme packs allowed people to place sounds and cursors and interesting touches on their PC. Then, Win2k came out and all that was kinda dropped from our collective memory. Suddenly the only people offering you OS skins and sounds for events where Gator and other spyware friends, so I had to start warning people against customizing. Yet, custom skins were sort of the precursor to today's mainstream fad^Wwish to have custom ringtones, and they were awesome.

Windows Media Player has horrible skin support, and I never see people customizing it like Winamp owners. iTunes doesn't even... so it's true that Winamp kinda has no mainstream peer.

I keep revisiting Winamp due to playlist features and chiptune plugins. Back this summer I installed it again and looked forward to skinning it. I was disappointed at how inaccurate the skin search is now, and had to settle with a modified Aeris skin, rather than the classic I got a decade ago on the same site.

Soon, lots of unmaintained plugin repositories pointing to Winamp will leave people scratching their heads at the dead links. Google didn't help me find Aeris. It's one thing finding some EXE, and quite another to locate specific filenames for skins that are centrally uploaded. File lockers didn't exist back then, and most hosting from has died. I ended up finding a few interesting files in a geocities-type search result, but that thought is cringe-worthy. I fear again what will happen to today's internet. It is 100 times more prone to obfuscate things behind js calls and ephemeral third-parties that won't be around in 10 years.

Took way too long to edit this, but also opens my eyes to another thing: if the digital world is something that gets me so worked up, I need to turn away from it and find more tangible hobbies for my own good. The powers that be could be months away from clicking a switch blocking half of that stuff, and it will feel like the pain of losing our imaginary MMORPG chars after a services closes.

Same reason why we "even" hold onto Word files: it's not that we *create* them, but that they're PUSHED hard to us by other content creators for work reasons. In a digital world, they are transmission and retention standards*. Our only influence is issuing private complaints to whoever sends us the files, but sometimes their workflow or software removes any say they personally have in the matter, as much automation outputs exclusively to pdf.

We can't be judging standard fatigue till *we* stop sending all our own non-trivial stuff in them. We tend to have "important" docs like high-quality resumes (*.doc is shifty for that), digital copies of your e-filed tax returns, blueprints, and certain legal docs and paystubs that just GOTTA be assured to look the same in all platforms. Thus, no, our trying to change the world by pasting into plain text, taking a screenshot, or giving a link to an [insecure] HTML server doesn't fix the issue. Sending a doc in some esoteric typeset format? ditto.

Just like the "solution" to facebook we all know, what will fix this one problem it is the appearance of yet another a run-everywhere competitor. Sadly, none of those tend to be very Free & Open

* Remember zip files?