Well, I was referring to the last 10 years in which the PC industry was expanding, not the current climate where it is stagnating. (I was also arguing on theory and hypotheticals, not hard facts in regards to MS in particular, as I haven't taken the time to research that.) Still, glad to know that at least some people understand.

You are absolutely correct. Business is a complicated matter, and if you don't take all the variables into account, you are just setting yourself up for failure. You need to find a way to balance the often conflicting goals to promote overall growth.

Growing market share does lead to increased shareholder returns all other things being equal. What I never said was that market share should be increased at any cost.

I am attempting to point out that there are many complicated factors in determining whether a specific policy or action is a success. Nothing more, nothing less. Or do you disagree that growing by 5% when all of your competitors grow by 10% is a failure? It is not a dismal failure, but it is by no means a success.

I don't recall saying that increasing market share is the optimal goal at any cost. It's not. But even if your profit margin per customer is 1000%, that doesn't matter if no one buys your product. One would hope that reasonable people realize that nothing exists in a vacuum. Indeed, the original point of my first message was to point out the shortsightedness of examining only a single variable to measure success. It is foolish to look solely at profit, just as it is foolish to look solely at market share. Every business action attempts to modify three variables: cost, value, and sales. Profit looks at only the first two, whereas market share is only relevant to the last. But if you fail to take all three into account, you have failed at business. Halving profit margins while doubling market share is a net zero for your business, and one should always aim for a net positive from your actions. I'm not sure how to explain it any clearer than that, so if you still have questions, please lay them out explicitly.

Of course not. That's a gross oversimplification. But if market share were not related to profit, then no one would pay for marketing, no?

Growing market share leads to improving shareholder returns. If the market you're in grows by 10%, but in the same period you only grow by 5%, then not only have you lost intangible market share, but that very tangible 5% of increased profit you missed out on.

I wasn't trying to imply that profit isn't important (it is), merely pointing out that in an expanding industry it is possible to gain a small increase in profit while simultaneously losing market share. Thus, profit alone cannot be the measurement by which managerial policies are judged. If you lose market share, then you lose potential profit, even if you can still chalk up "growth" in regards to profit.

Van Gogh was notoriously depressed. His entire career as an artist was little more than five years, ending with his suicide in 1890. The nature of his work changed dramatically at a rapid pace, pieces from a year before could almost be from another artist entirely. This all suggests that he was never truly satisfied with his works. It has nothing to do with the lack of financial success, but rather the lack of acceptance from his peers, who often derided him. He continued painting, not because he thought he was good at it, but because he wanted to get better.

Profit isn't really the best measurement of the success of a company in an expanding industry. Even if your profit increased, if over the same period you've lost market share, you've essentially failed. Not that I have any clue what MS market share looks like over the last 10 years; you still might be correct.

Um... yes actually. Van Gogh actually only sold one painting in his entire life, and he considered himself somewhat of a failure as a painter. He did not become famous until after his death.

I can attest to this. The phrase "Everything old is new again." (Or "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." for you BSG fans) is uttered so frequently in our office that we might as well emblazon it on the door. It's almost eerie how well some of the ideas from the mainframe era fit into the cloud computing ecosystem.

Thanks for the well thought out response. I do believe, however, that you've missed something rather critical. In a corporation, there are two types of stock: voting and non-voting (often called preferred stock, because in exchange for the voting rights you are given first priority for payouts). Institutional entities purchasing stock tend to take non-voting stock. Any holders of non-voting stock can be seen as amoral (or mechanical) third parties. It is only the holders of voting stock to which we can account moral responsibility.

Further, even if a mutual fund, investment bank, or other financial entity were to purchase voting stock, and actually use that influence to direct the company in question, then the burden of moral responsibility for the actions of the invested company does not stop at the investor, which is a non-sentient entity to which morality is not defined, it rather further divests into the moral holdings (to co-opt some investment terminology) of the investor's shareholders.

At the end of the day, as it were, every action that has been effected by humanity carries with it the moral burden of one or more humans. There is no action taken in the ontology of business that cannot be traced directly back to a human, and thus moral, source. Even taking HFT, for example, wherein computer algorithms act without human intervention to trade stock, resulting in possible real world moral consequences, there is still a moral locus: those who created and used those machines.

Side note: Thanks for the interesting debate. It's refreshing to meet level-headed intelligent people on the internet. :-P

While I agree that wealth is simply a tool, with no associative morality, I have to disagree with your view of corporations as amoral (or more accurately, that only corporations are amoral). Businesses of any form, whether sole proprietorships, non-profits, etc., are all inherently amoral (which is different from immoral), as they are merely organizational structures, and we do not assign morality to non-sentient entities. Therefore, morality of a business must derive from the directors of said business' actions, i.e. the owners.

For closely held businesses, such as a sole proprietorship, the moral impetus is easy to locate. For a corporation, it is not so much. The actions of a large corporation are resultant of Officers, who are hired and act on directives from the Board of Directors, who are chosen by shareholder votes. It would not be unreasonable, then, to say that the product morality of a corporation is derived from the collective morals of its shareholders, individually weighted by the number of shares each owns.

That is not to say that the individuals who act as instantiators of corporate policy do not bear moral responsibility for their actions in their positions. They do, but the chain of responsibility ultimately rests with the shareholders. Because each corporate management structure is unique, it is impossible to generalize an equation representing assignment of moral responsibility, though it is possible to do so on a per company basis, given adequate information.

Unfortunately, this system often goes awry because the moral individuals with the most wealth have a proportionately greater say in the moral direction of a Corporation. Corporate malfeasance is the result of conglomerated individual immorality, in an ontology wherein immoral actions are oft rewarded with increased wealth, and consequently influence. Unchecked, this pattern can spiral until immorality supplants morality as the driving force of the Corporate entity.

To sum, a Corporation is only amoral in the sense that it in itself bears no moral responsibility. That responsibility is divided amongst its management and shareholders, who are individually moral (or immoral) entities.

Well, if you're like me, then 90+% of the bits on your drives are not accessed on a daily basis. There's long term storage (data rarely changes, read occasionally), and then there's interactive storage (unpredictable read/write patterns, heavy use). Caching of the sort proposed by TFA would certainly increase performance for HDD use as interactive storage, but not to the level of SSD. Conversely, the performance enhancements offered by SSD are almost entirely wasted when used for long term storage.

So, in a desktop scenario, what makes the most sense is to have small, fast SSDs for your OS, Virtual Memory, Temp storage, and any frequently used applications, and then large, cheap, HDDs for straight storage.

If they were using WiFi, or somebody taps into their outgoing internet line (Cable/DSL/What have you), then it is possible to snoop on non-https traffic. Though I would only consider it to be "with ease" if it was unencrypted WiFi. Not that I believe that's what took place, as that would mean that the couple in question were under suspicion and investigation prior to those searches.