Let's be fair here for a minute. "Here's a handful of rabid crazy vociferous bloggers with crazy opinions that will make an awesome headline that gets lots of page views" is very different from "random normal people whose primary use for their smartphone is to track and share recipes with relatives". Most news is news entertainment and is not a reflection of what sane normal people say and do. I assure you, real life iPhone users don't give a shit about Android phones and probably wouldn't even be able to tell you a single device that even uses it (*mumble mumble* Galaxy EVO Ice Cream *mumble mumble*), and the same goes true for Android users (*mumble mumble* iPhone 5GS II Turbo with Hyperfighting *mumble mumble*).

That depends on your definition of average, mathematically speaking that's not true. What percent of numbers are below average in this set: {1, 1, 1, 1, 1000}

This isn't pedantry, this is a meaningful distinction: I expect the amount of good software is extremely outnumbered by the bad, and even good software developers can be forced into kludges by time pressures, bad team culture, etc. I don't see any reason to think that code quality globally resembles a normal curve.

Yea that's not what this was though, this was a marketing term and they started pushing it very early. Similarly technical documentation for developers refers to it all as Metro, if they were going to change that because it's not the real name, they would have done it before it went RTM.

Consider this: they have no other name for it. "Aero" is still "Aero", but "Metro" is now "Windows-8 style UI".

Maybe it's Microsoft's new OR-V framework: Object Relational Vagina (ORV)

I am not sure what you mean. The .NET Express IDEs are truly, 100% free. Software you write with it is yours and can be sold or made open source.

Okay, wanking about whether or not people have entitlement issues is missing the core of the situation.

There are developers that will be new to .NET development, and there will be developers that have already been developing desktop applications against the Express versions of the software. If we have learned nothing from the gaming console or phone platform wars, it is that you want to encourage application development. Any barrier to entry or project sustainability, even one that is merely perceived, will cause some number of people to pick a different platform to learn and grow on, and the .NET ecosystem will shrink. There are plenty of other languages and IDEs to turn to that are free, easy, and reliably maintained without having to worry about version-ed crippleware.

I am a full-time .NET developer. I'm an MSDN subscriber and so am utterly independent of the Express versions. Yet I feel very strongly that incidents like this hurt me and hurt .NET development on the whole. As a developer community we're already hamstrung by the lackluster (or totally absent, depending on how you look at it) cross-platform availability for the .NET framework and culture that leans more corporate/enterprise. The least we can do is provide a basic, sustainable development tools for learners and free/open projects.

To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.

That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P

Anecdotally, everyone I know from college still has the same political leanings they had.

More importantly, we're fooling ourselves to think the differences between the DNC and RNC are how much money they spend.

Without disagreeing with the substance of your post ($1 billion does seem like a lot for what it is), in principle things like notoriety/brand recognition, patents, and existing user base all are worth money, much more than whatever time it would take for a competitor to build an identical system from scratch.

Welcome to politics!

So? That means he getting laid, which is more than anyone can say for you coward.