Only if you have a version of Visual Studios installed that supports WInXP. They started that with VS2012 where you could still target WinXP if and only if you have VS2010 installed; VS 2012 was the first version of VS to use a predecessor's compiler environment to support older platforms.

..I stopped using Facebook Chat when they started wanting a separate app on my phone for it. I don't use it enough to justify a separate app. So now it's just an annoyance as the main Facebook app keeps telling me I have a message, but won't let me read the message - they never bothered to remove the panel from the main app that use to be for chats, it's now a promotional for the other app.

Blackberry fell due to flaws in the network design; they were so centralized that all their customer traffic had to go through their network. So when their network broke, their customers sought other solutions when the risk was finally revealed - one I would say was not predictable before that incident (at least from an outsiders POV; may be someone administering the a local box in an enterprise network who knew more about it might have predicted it). Needless to say, comparing Blackberry's fall and Nokia's fall is a bad comparison, one that should not have been made because of the drastic differences between them and their causes. One was due to technical grounds (Blackberry) while the other was due to management blunders (Nokia).

As to the rest, I'll leave that to more knowledgeable people...

Wrong.

Inflation is simply a raise in prices, which is primarily driven by a raise in wages. It has nothing to with what you're able to buy or how long you work, etc. If a gallon of milk cost $4 today and $4.10 tomorrow that's 10 cents of inflation for milk; overall it's calculated on the average of numerous goods and servers since we can only calculate inflation after the fact, it's a trailing indicator of what's happening in the overall economy, though its faster than many other indicators.

Problem is, when it comes to mobile it's consumer first; so Enterprise is following the consumer. They're adapting to strategies that make it easier to manage unmanaged devices to enable BYOD. Why? Because mobile has a very short lifespan (2 years) and Enterprises don't want to dump so much money into it. They'd rather their employees BYOD and sink money into mobile while they reap the benefits. The costs of integrating iPhone and Android is a pitance compared to the cost of buying and managing a fleet of mobile devices that have to be replaced every 2 years.

It'd be one thing if mobile devices had a lifespan similar to PCs - which are replaced every 3-4 years at best, if not closer to 6-8 years. But that's not the case.

As to Microsoft's specific problems in mobile, http://communities-dominate.bl... is a very good read.

You should read http://communities-dominate.bl...

That's called inflation.

The problem is not whether or not the factory pockets the savings or produces twice as much. Just because they have the potential to produce twice as much does not mean demand would support selling twice as much. They may only be able to sell as much as they made before, only now they can do so with fewer workers and at a (theoretically) lower price point, but that doesn't mean the market would justify moving to a lower price point in every case.

Further, the now unemployed workers that worked at said factory (or the potential workers for those that would have replaced retiring workers) have to find other employment; and unlike theoretical economics that does not always work as the theory says it should. For instance, the factory may eliminate more people closer to retirement, which means (a) if those workers needed new work, they would have a harder time, and (b) the younger workers that would have replaced them now need to look elsewhere as well; group (a) will have a hard time with retraining and finding equivalent worker; group (b) might too depending on that group's skill sets though (theoretically) most should be able to retrain/train to find jobs elsewhere.

And of course there is my favorite - people refusing to move to gain employment because where they are is where their family is; never mind that the jobs are not there any longer.

Counter-points:

If it took several workers to install a door - because it had to be lifted, moved, and held in place while someone put in the bolts to hold it on - or an engine - to lift, move into place, secure, etc - or glass - to move safely into place and secure it - and technology comes along that makes it possible for one worker to do those positions, then the number of jobs has decreased by a significant factor. Might other jobs in other areas be created (e.g to make the technology)? Yes; is the factor of jobs created sufficient to employ those that were displaced? No. For instance, if it took 3 people to install the car door before, but now it takes 1, that's a 3x factor in job loss; if the technology only required a 1 person to build it, then that's only a 2x factor in job creation - not sufficient for job replacement, at least 1 person is still unemployed. In this case it is plausible that both people that lost their job could potentially find an equivalent employment opportunity; but that's not always the case, especially for people that have been on the job for years and are within 10 years of retirement (they'll find it a lot harder to find a new position).

Or take the super markets - it use to be that each checkout lane required at least 1 person to operate (1 for the register, and possibly 1 to bag). However, now with self-checkouts 1 person can now operate 4-6 checkout lanes (as is the case at most grocery stores) or more (as is the case at Walmart) making at least a 4x factor in job loss, in some cases as much as an 8x factor. Does the technology for self-checkouts employ at the same factor? No. The scales simply don't work - there are hundreds of grocery stores, but only a few self-checkout lane manufacturers; so unless that self-checkout lane manufacturer employed at a rate of nearly 10x compared to a 4x job loss, the overall impact is a net job loss. Further, can those employed to run the checkouts (or bag) find equivalent employment? Not necessarily; even having 3 people compete for another job (let alone 3x# of grocery stores) will reduce the wages but also fill up other equivalent positions (at any kind of merchant) very quickly. Further, additional training may be necessary, and not everyone employed in these positions can necessarily receive the additional training to be able to "move up" to more advanced positions. For instance, high school students won't qualify for more advanced positions since they are still in school; many disabled fill bagger-type positions because those fit their skill sets and abilities well.

Or, as others have pointed out, look at the farming sector which use to employ hundreds to harvest a crop at any given farm. Technology has now enabled a handful of people to do the same work in most cases, especially soy, corn, and wheat. (Fruits crops - e.g apples, oranges, etc - still generally require humans due to delicacy of the crop.)

So, like it or not technology does create overall job loss, and economists, who play only in economic theory for the most part, don't take into account the varied types of people in the positions; they always assume that everyone can be trained for a more advanced position, which is not true. It's no different than a computer scientists creating an algorithm based on a Turing Machine with Infinite Memory and Infinite CPU capacity and expecting it to work on equally well on an i386 with 4MB as it does a i7 with 16GB of RAM.

There's a section of road in Michigan that use to connect two main roads. You can still see the road, but you can't get to it via the ramps - it's all closed off, completely unmaintained. You could probably walk/bike/atv/etc it; I haven't seen signs that say "no tresspassing" so theoretically it's still public property, but I wouldn't try to drive a car on it at 55MPH any more - weeds all through the concrete, etc.

They may have the staffing, but do they have the will? Not likely as it's this very mechanism that keeps so many on MS Office or using Office 365. If they did it right, then many would stop using those products, and that would result in a major hit to one of their main sources of income.

So they may have the ability, but the desire is not there, and won't be there until they believe they actually have to compete against another product in that segment, which won't happen until they believe their is a major threat to income in that segment. This is why they made OOXML and decimated the integrity of ISO to get is passed; while at the same time aggressively pursuing keeping ODF from being accepted as a standard for various governments - it was a threat that needed to be addressed.

This is also why OOXML has not seen a single update since its initial ratification - the threat was perceived to be resolved so no need to continue with that path. As a result, there is no version of MS Office (or Office 365) that produces an OOXML/ISO complaint document.

ODF has superior support for it by being able to save content (like images) natively (e.g as a JPG/PNG/GIF/whatever) inside the zip file that is an ODF file; stores it in the XML manifest, and the other files can reference it in their XML data as well.

OOXML might do that, or it might do what the old binary formats did and just dump a binary copy of it into the format for use as a binary blob that no one else knows that it is.

No, if the GP is having an issue, it's likely a fault in the software itself, one that has likely been fixed a long time ago.

In all fairness to Microsoft, they couldn't do that because much of the document format is binary dumps of memory, often containing pointers to Windows functions, etc. So it's really only valid on Windows. This is why there are so many binary blob extensions to the OOXML format that cover a vast majority of the MS Office functionality.

Not sure how they got the functionality to work for Mac, but then, MS Office for Mac (IIRC) is known for having incompatibilities with MS Office for Windows too, so it's not like they can make their own software truly compatible across platforms they support themselves. MS Office for Mac would probably have better compatibility with MS Office for Linux than it ever will with MS Office for Windows for the same reasons; you just don't binary dump application memory to file in those platforms to save your state like Microsoft does on Windows.

Even what support they do have is buggy in interoperability. For instance with ODS they move the formulas (stored by others) into an MS Word namespace and then save the values in the cell space. So it'll read it, and write it, but it won't be interoperable with anything else.

The claim was that ODS spec didn't have the Formula specification yet so it was valid to put it only in the MS Word namespace extension area where no one else would read it. At best, that's a brutally strict reading; it also ignored the whole effort around the ODF Formula specification that was going on, and completely ignored the purpose of ODF as an interoperable document format, and ignored what the community at large - and the many other ODF supporting vendors - were doing. At worse, it was a very specific decision to pretend to have support while making interoperability with others near impossible by using hard lines in the specification that no one else was taking.

In the end, I don't think I'd ever trust a version of MS Office to really support ODF properly.

There are a lot of facets to the costs of health care, and the biggest cost is actually having insurance to start with. Doctors that have started refusing insurance (of all kinds) have reduced overhead costs by 66% just from the lack of having to do all the paperwork, the filing and refiling in order to get paid, that goes along with accepting insurance.

There are other costs too, some of which are brought on by unions, some by insurance, some by suppliers. They all need to be reigned in.

You don't save by cutting only the biggest costs. You save by cutting all costs - by monitoring each penny, instead of by the dollar, tens of dollars, etc - by making each penny (per accounting terms) material.