Don't use a Win 8 device till Microsoft fixes the interface. Essentially like most other MS operating system releases it's the 'Wait for SP1' effect.

This is consistent in my advice about all hardware and software, whether from Microsoft or not. Truly new products take at least 18 months to work the bugs out. (There is some flexibility here: really good management will nail most of them in a shorter period, but that's rare.)

I have found this to be great advice with Apple products. You generally had to wait a couple years for them to revise the ROMs so you didn't get random undocumented bugs. And in the case of several machines, they never fixed them.

I view cars the same way. Brand-new 2013 models? Forget it. I'll buy the model that was new in 2008 and they've steadily been upgrading it since then. (Some of the best cars on the market use 1960s designs -- for example, for engines or body -- that they've been incrementally upgrading for decades, like some of the Volvo, Mercedes and Toyota models or even some of the older American pickup trucks.)

And i've been there to see it all from c64s to apple2es, to pc's running dos, desqview, os/2, win31 all the way up to windows 8.

Me too, except for OS/2, which scared me off. The "good old days" were good not for the products in them, but how good they were for the time, especially in contrast to what came before.

I don't think I'd want to trade today's OSs for some of those older, chaotic days.

People are just too slow to change.

Another way to view this is that they understand what's current now, and change forces them to learn new things, at which they might not be as competent. They're afraid of that, understandably.

I anticipate buying a new ultrabook in the next month, it'll come with windows 7, but it'll be running Linux Mint a few hours after I get my hands on it. I have no plans to run Windows 8 right now, or ever.

A Linux install running VMs for Windows XP, 7 and any other environments you need is one of the best ways to configure a laptop.

Nothing wrong with not duplicating...but you kind of have to have a better product when entering an established market.

I think it is a better product, absent a few interface glitches. You can run desktop software on a tablet in a secure and powerful environment.

The criticism appears to be only about those interface glitches.

Ideally, they'll keep improving it and lower their prices to make it more competitive. Yours is good advice for the 'SFT.

Innovation is generally incremental. The iPod was not the first MP3 player; they just perfected it. The same is true of many MSFT products.

Microsoft just made the first FULL desktop OS capable of running on all devices including touch based tablets, and you find that to be a bad move?

Microsoft also unified the computer market with Windows back in the 1990s. Before that, it was sheer chaos and incompatibility. Windows and FAT32 gave the world a standard.

While many people dislike it, Microsoft Office was the first complete and integrated office suite to include all the functions needed in an average office. It took it some years to get good, but now it's the standard.

Windows 95 gave us real multitasking at a time when you could freeze a Macintosh by holding down the mouse button.

Come to think of it, the 'softies have done a lot of good things.

And then there's Microsoft Research and Microsoft Press.

Yes, slavishly copying how other people do stuff isn't innovation. Producing something which is unusable is just incompetence, and it sounds like they'd have been better off just ripping everybody else off.

First, you're taking this guy's word that it's unusable. Second, the first version of just about anything is less usable than subsequent versions. Do you remember the 1984 128k Macintosh? Or the first Mac laptop (sorry... "portable")?

Three words: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

That would only apply to direct adoption, correct? Making your own clone of something and then extinguishing it does nothing. If you take over a product line, and then manage to kill it off, that might work, but you need a secondary competing product line.

I'm pretty sure the "embrace, extend, extinguish" campaign with the Zune didn't do much to the iPod.

What use would it be to invent something that duplicates iOS or Android?

People would just keep using the original and deny the copy.

It's smart to take features from these systems, but useless to repeat them. Technology is forged by people who find new ways to do useful things. That doesn't mean imitation, it means re-invention.

Microsoft also has a long legacy of Windows products and users to uphold, and has to merge these two.

I realize that liking Windows around here is about as favorably looked upon as non-ironically liking Bruce Springsteen at a hipster party, but demonization for not being a clone is undeserved here.

We keep hearing about how banks, firms, etc. that were "too big to fail" have ...failed.

Then we hear about how humanity is now global and the future is bright. Are we too big to fail, and thus prone to failure?

The interest in Mars seems less about exploration and more about looking for another planet to inhabit. Taken as a whole, this one may be about done, or rather, the human civilizations on it appear to be teetering over the precipice of internal disaster.

But Kaspersky’s rise is particularly notable—and to some, downright troubling—given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

Any comment on these allegations?

And now companies are starting to realize that it's not saving them money, but costing them money, as they have to fix the mistakes or start getting additional, more qualified work overseas or in the host country.

I've seen a lot of this as well. The jobs that are getting outsourced now are those where the quality of the worker does not matter so much as ability to memorize, repeat and achieve high rates (more than high accuracy). Good observation on your part.