Monopoly means single, sole supplier. 89.95% (as of 10/14) is not a monopoly. It's exactly 10.15% (as of 10/14) short of being a monopoly. Just because no desktop Linux distribution can market itself out of a paper bag and Apple is happy with high margin low volume machines that doesn't mean Microsoft is a sole supplier.

"being a monopoly is terrible, because people do not have a choice in using a product"
So if I go invent some new item/widget/process/service/whatever that the world has never seen before and I end up doing amazingly well because of it I'm terrible? I'm the first and only supplier so I have a monopoly for no other reason than I had a brilliant idea and brought it to market. That doesn't make me terrible it makes me an innovator. Almost every government of the world will let me benefit from that by granting my a patent on my idea to give me a legally protected monopoly position for about a quarter decade. Nothing about any of that makes me or my fictitious company terrible - other than you and your incorrect definition of and views on monopolies.

Hypothetical situations that refute your ignorant statements aside, Microsoft is not a monopoly. There are competing products and people every day choose to use them. Microsoft is not attempting to stifle the sales of devices that run other operating systems. It even creates markets on those systems; Office for Mac, Office Mobile for iOS & Android, Skype for just about damn everything - and even contributions to Linux, being the largest kernel submitter for 2012 and most of 2013. All of that helps increase the adoption of those platforms. That is not the behavior of an illegal monopolist.

Communism has nothing to do with monopolies, absolutely nothing. Straw-man arguments are the first and last refuge of someone ill equipped to properly debate the topic at hand. If you believe Soviet era Russia only had one supplier for anything your knowledge of history is woefully small.

I know about computing history in the 1990s. Again, it is irrelevant to the Build announcements this week. The Microsoft of 2014 is behaving amazingly well; developing good products and embracing the idea of letting developers use their tools to deploy software on a multitude of platforms, not just those that Microsoft owns.

The only group of people that don't appear to appreciate what was announced at Build are people that just want to have a villain so they can act hurt and repressed. The only villains doing that to them are themselves.

Even if your claim of a desktop OS monopoly was true (it isn't), being a monopoly isn't in itself bad or illegal. Using your monopoly position to quash competition in or entering that space is where things go from good to bad. Microsoft's announcement today of opening .NET, providing VS to small teams gratis, and providing an Android emulator within VS (and standalone) all point to the face that Microsoft isn't attempting to stifle competition on desktop, mobile, or anywhere else. They're doing what they've always done best, providing development tools. They're providing tools you can use to deploy software just about anywhere.

Why? Why does it matter what CPU is in your phone if it runs the OS you want? I'm honestly curious. How does it materially affect you?

The two statements about the more expensive the wedding the greater the chance of divorce and that the larger the ceremony you have the less likely you are to end up divorced seem mutually exclusive to me.

Why not 5M or 10.15365M? What makes 8M a number that needs to be announced & celebrated?

Sapphire would not have prevented this. It would have made it worse. Sapphire is much more brittle than glass, which is actually quite flexible. With sapphire people would have bent phones with shattered screens. Luckily you'll probably never see a phone with a sapphire face:

* It's brittle
* It has to be milled to shape, increasing costs over glass due to manufacturing and lack of quick scalability in the manufacturing process.
* It is less transparent than glass, so battery life will suffer due to increased screen brightness requirements to be on par with glass phones

Apple bought that sapphire factory for the high-end apple watches. Sapphire is common on high end watches and Apple wants to hit all of the checkboxes necessary to be able to sell into that market.

For Pete's sake, read and comprehend before being incorrectly righteously indignant!

September 2013 comes before December 2013 by any reasonable reckoning. If the last post on the blog was December 2013 and the one from September 2013 is referred to as the penultimate post it's a fairly safe assumption that the author is correctly stating that the September 2013 post was the second to last post made.

I'm glad the author cites the blog posts he's written against the idea as supporting evidence that there is a groundswell against the idea....

Up the road at Purdue University there are always quite a lot of memes about Indiana University. They're all really negative, so that might affect the study results.

So, installing malicious software means your information can be accessed? SHOCKING.

The first commercial game I shipped, SVGA Air Warrior (November, 1992) came on five 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks. Three of those disks contained nothing but drivers for various video and sound cards. DOS absolutely had drivers, they were a nightmare to deal with.

John Conner will save us.

Do you truly, honestly, I mean...REALLY believe that Microsoft expends any time at all even thinking about ReactOS or WINE, let alone worrying about the .00000000000001 of a fraction of a portion of a negligible amount of a percent effect it might, MIGHT have on their bottom line?

Seriously, answer seriously, please.

You're not going to just put a 777 down on some rural 2 lane road. You need a clear 1 mile (or more) straight reinforced runway. Not only is a 777's wheel track too wide for an average road the gross weight of the plane would crush the asphalt (or dirt or gravel) under the wheels. Bare minimum you'd need a fairly modern multi-lane highway. Something like that would be traveled enough that someone would notice a large commercial airliner attempting to land on it.

All he needs to do is point a webcam out his window and I'm sure he'll be able to get face recognition hits, names, addresses, SSNs, etc... of everyone standing in his yard.