You misunderstand the problems in poorer countries. It is precisely because the supply chain cannot provide goods at any cost that 3D printers will be more successful even at 3x the cost. You know how fucking annoying it is to source nuts and bolts in India locally? It's damn near impossible, and not mention that the one guy in town who may stock it doesn't give a shit about you. Piss him off and you won't sell you a part even if you pay him double.

The small shop business model that can create any item with reasonable cost in reasonable time has tremendous value in poorer countries.

Lego has survived because they have patents that are aggressively protected. The last toy maker that tried to make Lego compatible/interoperable bricks got taken to court and lost I believe.

The Internet took over 20 years to transform society and we still haven't brought everyone in society on board.

My guess is that 3D printing will be more transformative to undeveloped and developing countries due to the lack high quality goods supply chains. Developed countries will have still have a shift but more gradual like you said. Still, if the speed and variation of 3D goods because nearly instant, things will change much faster. I am more excited about how 3D printing will transform prefabricated goods with higher quality and more sophisticated designs.

All three countries you mentioned operate under the euro and do not have issuing authority. This means that the three countries essentially operate in a synthetic metallist framework, not chartalist. Contrast the situation with those same countries under their own sovereign currency. If Greece expanded their money supply too much, it's ability to import would decline because of currency devaluation; however as a financial tool, currency devaluation is far more preferable than austerity. Countries would gladly choose to import less in the short and medium-term rather than impose harmful austerity that has real negative impacts. Sure, if a country is resource constrained, too much devaluation will be harmful, but the US has virtually limitless resources compared to most countries. If tomorrow it chose to massively expand fiscal spending, the worst case scenario would be that the US would import less goods spurring domestic production from all our underutilized productive capacity and labor. Our real terms of trade would at the very worst be at balance.

Microsoft doesn't really have time to fudge millions of telemetry numbers. You may argue that telemetry data is biased or skewed towards larger organizations if you want, but the reality is Office is used because large influential organizations use it and Microsoft introduces the features that they want. Everyone doesn't "need" a different 10%, they learn to use or choose to use a different 10%, its an empirical fact. Most people don't learn Office feature sets formally, but rather in organically. Because the the product allows to accomplish similar things in a variety of ways, some way efficient and some not, people just stick with the path they know. This is especially clear in my case when I try to leverage pivot tables in Google Spreadsheet vs. Excel 2010/2013. Google Spreadsheet allows me to do most of the basic and some of the intermediate data processing I need to build models, but in order to do 100% of the job, I'd have to jump through many more hoops to get Google Spreadsheet to do what I need it to do. Anyone who uses Google Docs and says they haven't had to change their authoring workflow is not being 100% genious. In fact Google's whole strategy has been to tell people that the features its product lacks isn't really that important to begin with, and they're right for a subset of the general user population. This strategy also also allow Google to come closer to feature parity...thought it'll never really happen.

The point is that if your organization invests in Microsoft Office across the enterprise and chooses not to leverage more advanced productivity/collaboration features, you're pretty much paying for compatibility and throwing a lot of money down the drain. Such organizations may find it better to either fire their IT staff or CIO, OR switch to Google or OpenOffice. Organizations with lower quality information workers may find the switch away from Office just fine, but I would argue that the goal should be to provide tools that raise productivity capabilities of the workers. And while I don't discount your experience, I have dealt with massive customer bases that have made that switch only to come back to MS Office stack. Office365 has come such a long way that today its almost a no-brainer compared to Google Apps.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensen...

i know this...i'm telling you the approximate real statistic from Microsoft Telemetry circa 2008.

everything you've said is essentially backwards from how the economy really works. Today inflation is under 2%. Interests rates/risk-free rates are the lowest ever which businesses like. The federal government does not make up too much of the economy. Your statement must be qualified with regard to the strength of the private sector and foreign sector. During a recession or depression you want the federal government to be bigger. Today its not spending nearly enough and as a society we are losing in real terms while people like you work about a number on a spreadsheet.

  As for your business partner example, the Federal government is not a business or a household. The Federal government is a sovereign issuer of the currency AND user of the currency, while state and local governments, businesses, and households are only the users of the currency.

The US Debt is a residual that has no economic meaning.

You understanding and application of CPI is completely wrong. It is not about what one single dollar can buy, but what all the dollars in a household can buy. In real terms, US households are far more wealthy today than in the early 20th century. No amount of dollars in 1920 could buy a telephone or electricity, or computers, or cheap high quality imports. The average US household went from spending over a quarter of its household income on food in the mid 20th century to less than 20% today. That is real wealth.

you should read economic theories that compare metallism vs. chartalism. Today we have a social and political class that think, behave, and operate as if we are under a metallist framework, when in fact there is no question that the US and most of the world operates under a chartalist framework. People have no clue what "the full faith and credit of the United States" actually means, and I wish this sentence would be abolished because all this really mean today is that as long as the federal government demands taxes paid in US dollars, and it alone is the sole issuer, there will always be a demand for US dollars. As long as the US government continues to effectively collect taxes and spend money, the US dollar will always have credibility. Even if no foreigners or private sector people buy US T-bills, the federal reserve will always buy them.

Of course you can't keep printing more and more, the problem that most technology people have is that they have little operational clue as to how the financial system and monetary system actually work. Trying to understand the modern financial world through the lens of undergraduate macroeconomics is like trying to understand graph theory with only a background in algebra.

The reality is that the federal government can print/spend as much money as it wants. The only real constraint is whether this spending causes an untenable amount of inflation. The US National Debt is in fact simply a residual that has no real economic meaning. Even if it was twice as large and inflation doubled to 3.5% or even 5%, it would be absolutely fine.

Lastly, you have to remember that the federal government has another tool to combat inflation, which is taxes. Taxes hedge inflationary risks by removing money from circulation. Federal spending adds money to circulation.

They skirt around this by not offering in app office365 subs.

Regarding your Pareto principle, the actual statistic is 90% of users only use 10% of the feature on aggregate. The problem is that every individual in the 90% uses a different 10%. Microsoft telemetry backs this up, and this is why they don't split the product up even further. Consider Excel. A researcher uses a very different subset of the app compared to an engineer or financial analyst. There isn't a year that goes by where I don't see a non-trivial usage model for Excel. As for PowerPoint and Word, the same idea applies but is less apparent until you factor in line-of-business integration of the docs and app on the server side, natively or via add-ons.

While there is definitely a consumer case to argue that Office is overkill for home use, as long as business find value in using the advanced features of Office, people will continue to use Office at home, whether or not they personally utilize said advanced features.

*former MSFT employee*

Define "imminent" please.

I think the outrage becomes slightly more relevant because Mozilla is a non-profit organization. There are a whole host of "values" that color the perceptions of organizational donors, supporters, and employees. The last few years, political activism in the tech world on social issues has increased a lot. A decade ago, this CEO would not have faced much scrutiny, but today organizational leaders face numerous litmus tests both from the left and right, especially if the organization is non-profit. It speaks to the polarization in our politics, because the issue of gay marriage has nothing to do with the mission of Mozilla Foundation.

It's actually not their road. Each step of the way, local state and federal government has allowed them to build, often times with significant subsidy and tax breaks. We have sanctioned their monopoly/oligopoly, and now it's time to break it up.

The strength and credibility of the dollar is unquestioned, and it will remain unquestioned so long as the federal government spends money and collects taxes without causing too much inflation.