Indeed but they have the "build it and they will come" delusion of selling tens of millions of tablets. If desktop Metro really sucks that bad then the PR uproar will force Microsoft to make it optional for keyboard and mouse.

Well if we want to go down this hypothetical path then Android could have Google + Device Manufacturer + Carrier spying. That would be three Android spies vs iPhone's one.

Battery life aside, I imagine it would be incredibly painful to use a desktop application on a tablet. In a roundabout way, maybe this will devs will make some effort redesign desktop apps to fit the form factor.

I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone but even I have to cut them some slack for the first update to essentially a version 1 product.

A few problems off the top of my head:

1) This requires large speculative investor to have a huge position in order to pull this off. We'd see at least an 8K filed with the SEC if MS were to purchase this position and a ridiculous amount of articles in the press. Also, the MS board wouldn't approve paying a huge premium for a loser company when they could just sign a regular 'ol licensing deal like with their other WP7 partners.

2) Large speculative investor would make much more money with a hostile takeover and then a breakup of the company.

3) WP7 partners would be pretty pissed if MS took an ownership interest in Nokia.

I too have complaints about the article but the omission of Windows CE is not one of them. That was a big player in the Pocket PC handheld space but a handheld is clearly not a tablet. Microsoft's tablet strategy was to shoehorn in Windows proper and neither that nor attempts at Windows CE tablet ever gained any traction. Windows Embedded was targeted at POS and field devices so it has even less place in a tablet article.

I'm going out on a limb and saying Bing's merits have little to do with this deal. Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook in 2007 so of course Facebook is going to be drinking their Kool-Aid.

Are you for real? +3 Informative? Net neutrality is about making sure Internet access providers do not discriminate against content providers which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you think it is.

Amen. I'm a former subscriber to both WSJ and IBD. WSJ front page was worthwhile and IBD charts were awesome but the rest of those papers were pretty much one big op-ed section. Still searching for suitable replacements.

Picking nits here but people subscribe to WSJ and FT for business, economic and financial news. General news organizations just don't devote enough resources to do a good job covering those specialized topics. "Stock information" in the form of publicly available data is free from Yahoo, Google, CNBC, TheStreet.com and plenty other sites.

Mod up! I've used pretty much every Microsoft OS since DOS 3.x and many of their development and enterprise products. Clearly things have gotten tremendously better over that time but I long ago stopped trusting them after decades of dealing with mediocre products, Linux FUD attacks and DOJ investigation shenanigans. There's really nothing they can do now to reverse that.

No doubt there's some iPhone cannibalism but, in the end, the iPhone is a huge net positive for Apple. Also, don't write off the iPod just yet. Not everyone is going to buy a iPhone/Android/whatever. Unit sales are essentially flat year over year despite the new crop of improved smartphones.

2) The whole investing thing is about growing profits. If a company doesn't grow then neither will its value. Microsoft's share price is flat over the trailing 5 years yet Apple is up 400%. That's no accident. Hey maybe you're risk averse and don't care for the high beta of a fast grower and that's cool but I wouldn't be chalking up Apple's success to faddish products.

iPod has been around for 9 years so I don't see how that's a fad. If people are switching to a converged device then it's mostly to the iPhone. I guess that's a fad too.

It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. They're basically betting they'll eventually make more money from subscriptions than from advertising. FT and WSJ can do a paywall because their news is very specialized but a regular newspaper is going to have a tough time without offering something unique.

Let's look at facts instead of hyperbole.

1. The iPod has been around for almost nine years and iPhone for three years. Hardly a hyped up fad that will disappear overnight. The Walkman lost its relevance when CDs came out. Perhaps there's a new disruptive music technology sometime in the future but we'd be hard pressed to name it right now.

2. Microsoft's earnings are flat over three years while Apple's has more than doubled. That's not even including the iPad. Microsoft's growth will come from Windows 7, server and office products but that's mostly coming from corporate spending which is still down in the dumps. Xbox is basically a break even product line so it's not even worth mentioning in this conversation.

Well if we're gonna talk about current and future PE then we need to look at PEG. IBM's PEG is 1.01 and AAPL's is 1.11. That's about a 10% difference but it's hard to argue that either is outrageously mispriced.