They really should have taken a page from Apple. When the music labels tried to strong-arm iTunes pricing in the early days, Apple just laughed at them and said "No. You'll take what we give you, and you'll like it." They could do this, because the iPod, and thus iTunes, was by far the most wildly popular digital music platform in the world, and they knew they had all the bargaining leverage against the labels that they needed

Netflix is in the same boat. They are far and away the biggest streaming platform around, wildly popular, and almost ubiquitous at this point. At least in North America. Who can compete with them? Blockbuster? Their platform is a joke. Hulu? Nextflix is (was) not much more per month, and Hulu still forces ads on you and has asinine and frustrating device playback restrictions on certain content, mainly because they're run by the media companies. Netflix should have all the muscle needed to force their way around the studios.

What they lack, is a strong personality like Steve Jobs in their leadership, who had no issues playing hardball with anyone, anytime.

Does this mean my MP3.com t-shirt from 1998 is back in style again?

That last sentence is what's known as a "Slashdot Cred Enhancer". It's +1 credibility point for proclaiming that you run Linux as your only OS, and +2 credibility points for actually calling it GNU/Linux.

Back in 2001, a virus stole all my TreeLoot dollars. 2 years of punching the monkey, all down the drain in an instant.

use Open::Innovation;

What I learned from this list, is all anyone cares about is Project Managers. So, who's actually going to do all the real work?

I really don't understand why a small web startup would go with Microsoft. The licensing costs when you (hopefully) start to scale up are going to kill you. There's a reason that all the big-hit startups over the past decade weren't standardizing on Windows as their web platform.

I don't think quite you get the point. Mid-size businesses generally have progressed beyond the limitations of the free ESXi and vSphere Essentials level (which is a good fit for smaller businesses), but don't have needs that require vSphere Enterprise (which, realistically, Microsoft has nothing that can compare to). At that mid-level point, Hyper-V's pricing is very attractive compared to VMware, which is still fairly expensive, even with the Standard package. And when you're already an all-Windows shop, it's an easy jump to make.

It's still a bad decision, because if you grow, you're going to be stuck with the fairly limited Hyper-V and have a more difficult migration path into VMware when you're ready to join the big-boy world. But it's still a tempting deal.

Microsoft has been making some inroads with Hyper-V with mid-size businesses that are already 100% Windows environments - especially ones that haven't quite started down the virtualization path. Their licensing is attractive to these smaller companies, compared to VMware (at least the higher-end vSphere offerings). And it's Microsoft, which they're already comfortable with.

VMware destroys Hyper-V in just about every possible way at the enterprise level, but mid-size companies often don't need all the bells and whistles that vSphere offers, even as cool as they are.

I'd imagine his name might have had a small amount of impact on his popularity.

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

It sounds like this guy is just upset that technology has progressed to the point where we don't need to pay out the nose for some high-priced UNIX consultant to spend 3 days troubleshooting an issue that can be fixed in minutes or hours.

Just because you might learn more by spending days chasing down an issue instead of using your available tools to quickly redeploy the server and get the business back up and running, doesn't make that the correct decision. If you really want dig into the root cause, clone the broken VM off and research it after you get a fresh one deployed from template.

Sony didn't take it over, they were always in charge of SWG from the start. But in 2005 they got a bad case of WoW-envy and decided that ~200,000 subs wasn't enough, since Blizzard had over a million by that point. So they completely redesigned the whole game in a misguided attempt to turn it more WoW-like and simplistic. This change was thrust on the entire player base without any warning whatsoever. Literally, you logged in the next day and it was no longer the game you were playing the night before, and all your hard work was rendered worthless.

They shed at least 75% of their subs within months, and somehow still limp along to this day with a few thousand die-hards who won't leave. It was a real-life example of the fable of the dog carrying a bone and seeing his own reflection in the water.

In my personal experience, the FTC's Do Not Call list has actually worked pretty well. I used to get considerable numbers of telemarketing calls every night, but about 6 months after adding all my numbers to the list, they've almost completely stopped. And on the very, very rare occasion that I do get one, a quick mention that this number is on the Federal Do Not Call list sends them into a near panic state, scrambling to hang up.