Libertarianism is the new Communism. It's an ideology that sounds nice on paper, but doesn't really work in real life.

Except that you are mixing your apples and oranges here. Libertarianism is a political ideology that goes along with conservatism and liberalism (and others.) While Communism is an economic philosophy that opposes capitalism.

To say that Communism doesn't work in real life isn't entirely accurate either. All we've seen so far is a form of Totalitarian Communism where all the power of the state is vested in a small group at the top. It's entirely possible to have a Democratic Communism where the the power of the state is vested in the people who make the decisions and the state still retains the means of production. We can't say that this form of Communism doesn't work because it hasn't really been tested.

We can surmise that it probably won't work because of the nature of people. But that's not proof of failure.

You're probably not too far off the mark with this one.

A lot of companies tend to struggle after the founders/visionaries depart. It's not that the people left in charge are incompetent. It's because the founders had a clear direction and were successful enough to stare down the more troublesome shareholders. Once they're gone the new management tends to lose that direction.

I suspect that Microsoft will go through the same struggles once Gates is completely out of the picture. I wouldn't be surprised to see the company make some quite bad business decisions based on shareholder pressure.

The same thing will probably happen to Google, Facebook, and others.

As for micro-transactions, they won't fly in the U.S. for a long time, especially in today's economy. People won't justify paying $xx for an item they can get with some time they already paid for. Even the geeks with cash they normally burn through are cutting back on extras.

A large number of players in the US market already take part in micro-transactions across all the games out there. The difference is that they are not generally sanctioned by the game companies.

Gold selling and powerleveling services are big business, and the players themselves have proved that they are willing to pay real cash for in-game items. If players are willing to pay third-party gold sharks and take risks with their accounts, it'd be a good bet that they'd pay for officially sanctioned items too.

I wouldn't count out micro-transactions in the US market yet.