The thing is they have the Star Wars and lord of the rings sets. But they have a castle set that is like it always was. I was at the Lego store and they have 2 lines of space sets that aren't tied to any movies or franchises.

Having never seen one in person, I wonder how fast you can really type on those covers. If they will be as good as a traditional keyboard or the speed most people can get will be somewhere inbetween a normal keyboard and the virtual screen keyboards all tablets have.

Is this Microsoft's attack on the App Store?

"When I hear about 600,000 apps, I’m just in awe. As I’ve said many times before, however, I don’t think it’s the right number for comparison. Nobody is using more than a couple dozen applications on their device."

Even If I don't count the many games and educational apps my kid use I still see many more than a couple dozen apps that I used in the last week on my ipad.

Also I don't think hooking a mouse to a tablet is a great feature for surface. It just shows me Microsoft doesn't know how people use tablets. Perhaps they should goto a coffee shop and look at all the people using there competitors tablets. the keyboard can make sense if you type large emails or even do word processing, but I would guess most don't use physical keyboards enough to need to purchase one.

Ipad 200,000+ apps, Windows RT has notepad and Office for people who see a tablet and think I want to crunch spreadsheets on that(which you can do on ipad for 9.99 app). advantage ipad

The Xoom was priced a lot higher than the ipad, I don't recall the market responding to this "better" product.

The difference is Apple came to market with the ipad first and has a large marketshare with users that have a penalty to switch since all the apps they bought wont work on Surface. then there is the kindle fire and nook which are less than half the price competing on the low end, who is this product marketed to?

If you are last to market you need to give some reason to switch to your product. Simply saying its Windows doesn't help, Windows Phone doesn't have any real marketshare. On the phone side they already lost with this strategy, an ARM tablet running a version of Windpws most people don't know how to use priced at the sme price as a product that had 3 years of mostly positive buzz around it doesn't make much sense. Plus if a ipad mini is release next week nobody will even notice the 499 surface since all the tech press will talk about is ipad minis and ios maps.

When I hire I find most self taught aren't very good either. I think those with a degree generally have better breadth and depth with different technologies and theories. This is partially because a degree forces you to do some things you aren't interested in. But if you're looking for corporate developers go with information systems majors. Databases design and applied programming languages are more useful to most internal business analyst/developer types than compiler design, Assembler language, and even C.

I would mod you up if I could. That's the biggest problem with most people I work with they want to solve Ll problems with the tool they are best with even if that tool isn't the best for the problem at hand. This applies at all sorts of IT layers: desktop software, OS, development languages, database platforms, ect... It's the old if all you have is a ha,met everything looks like a nail problem.

while I could answer your second question I think there are plenty of good Windows Server Administrators who could not. That type of questioning is more for a DBA or a developer type than a server administrator at any of the places I have worked

Mac has been increasing for home marketshare pretty good though. It will never compete(atleast highly unlikely) in the corporate space though. I bet if you could count all iPads in fortune 500 companies though you'd see what Microsoft is worried about.

re you implying that 10 years ago the Windows ecosystem wasn't as big or bigger than it is now. If anything it has shrank some because of the effect of smart phones and the iPad.

From a UI perspective there is nothing really wrong with the ribbon, it's just unfamiliar when you first use it. Overall I don't think it is any better or worse than a traditional menu system.

Windows 8 UI will be fine for people who want to learnd it. But at work where atleast half the people hate change the UI will cause endless complaints.

Very few entry level salaries at retail stores pay "living" wages. I don't think you understand that low skilled jobs don't pay high wages.

I don't think you would do any better at Best Buy and that is about the closest thing I can think of.

There is no certainty that Android will start taking share from IPhone, it hasn't happened yet, I don't see it happening in 2012. the difference between Apple and Google is that Apple is number two in marketshare but number one in revenue. Google needs to find a way to make android more profitable, winning marketshare certainly hasn't helped.