Their innovation was that they invent something that people like. Their advantage is that they invented it first and should have both the buzz and the initial profits of said game. If you think that magically a clone game company can write the exact same game at a fraction of the cost, I'd say you're a liar, the original company did it horribly, or they stole the content assets from the original.

1. Yeah, most likely. Games are not trivial to write. They're incrementally easier if you know exactly what you want it to do, but a trivial to develop game being trivial to write will get cloned... a LOT. How many platformers that behave 99% like mario exist in the market? Oh yeah, a metric F-ton.
2. The 'early into market advantage' is ruined due to expensive development, oh well. Do better next time
3. Direct copy is easy to identify and Google / Apple / etc.. will honor DMCA takedowns like anything else

Yes officer, I just yelled fire because 'someone else' did. I didn't start a panic for nefarious purposes or anything. There's only ONE place to report the threat of a bomb, and that's to authorities, not to a general public who can often knee jerk a response to a potentially real emergency without any form of organized response.

Coming up with my own startup is just too hard to do. Instead, can one of you think of a cool technology I can half-assed write in the hopes of getting a huge payout from some monolithic corp decides that they-too want to jump into the hot market of the moment?

e-books are less weight meaning they travel more often, and I am reading on average twice what I did on dead trees. Single data point entered.

I used Lync for precisely one thing, and that was to redirect my handset to my personal cell. I never touched it again. Instead I plugged in Pidgin which has relatively ok IM support for Lync and never touched it again.

Desktop sharing is built into the OS, and frankly I never used. I try to use hangouts whenever I get the chance, but sometimes I'm forced to use gotomeeting with some customers when they use it. No customer has ever asked for RDP / Lync based demos, and frankly I'm not even sure if its possible externally (well RDP is, but its an even worse demoing tool).

Meetings/N-way calling/video conferences / etc.. all rely on you converting your entire PBX infrastructure over to the MS way of things as well. So yeah, if you're FULLY VESTED in MS technologies, then absolutely you're going to get lift.

But I took an arrow to the knee.

In 2006/2007, you had two large fads in computing -- Web sites and Windows apps. There were billions of other things, but they were the big ones with high visibility. Today, add in 'remote virual hosted' (AKA developers are now the IT guys *shudder*) and mobile apps (A marketplace which is only now getting good tooling / support from more than a handfull of vendors) sure things may be crap compared to desktop/web which have many years of established practices and trained staffing. Look at the web in 2001 vs. 2007 and tell me there wasn't an entire f-ing world of difference in terms of quality and reliability? Try 1997 - 2004 for desktop apps?

There will always be 'developing technologies' that come out scrappy and crappy but over time they'll start getting boring and predictable like all the other technologies before them. This is just the way our eco-system (and most others) work.

Its a sad first world problem when you complain about possibly earning > 250K (gross) in property appreciation and then complain about how you can't claim 100% of a tax break that you're no longer entitled to (because you make too much). Dumb laws they may be, but you sir, complain for the wrong reasons.

I'd also address the note on savings accounts, but frankly its way to factual, boring and irrelevant to bother. Go look it up online if you want to know why your savings accounts are worth penuts these days, as sad as it is. There are reasons, but you may need to spend a lot of boring hours appreciating it.

Don't get me wrong, I know the nuance of the change, I just had to laugh that 4K video was the selling feature of a tablet. I'd be hard pressed to see the difference in 1080 / 4K with my 52" TV and I'm 20/20, forget a screen pixel density significantly smaller pixel density rating or even perceived pixel density rating.

Because what I was missing from a tablet was 4K movies!

Tell that to diaspora.

Microsoft has had arm ports of their embedded OS's for over a decade. The only reason it got any ink is because they tried to shove it into use by the general public. Since RT is probably more WinCE than NT under the hood, this just makes sense.

async+await seems a lot like features included in java.lang.Concurrent which has been in Java since 1.5 and as a popular third party add-on before that. Maybe they aren't language sugar in the same way level C# integrates with it, but it also means I can swap in various implementations of the provider if I found a more optimal solution for my specific problem area.

Dunno what you mean. Java has supported multiple JRE impl's on the same PC for at the very least 5 years and if a crap tool like FORMS does something wrong, then I'd say they're crap for it. Why not blame Flash because my Twitch video is stuttering, or blame HTTP because the web site I want to view threw a 404. Ultimately, if the end user vendor sells a crap product then blame the product, not the tool generally.