Tizen is the german word for dingleberry-- those pieces of crap that cling to the hairs of your butt. I think if they ever intended to ship they might have checked that.

"I have a copy of phpnuke/moodle/wordpress running in my bedroom" != server.

And yes, active directory is a big reason enterprises are Windows focused.

It's 20-fucking-14 and the Unix world still doesn't have an out of the box working directory service. No, i don't want to create my own LDAP schema and fuck with kerberos and PAM.

No, NIS+ is not a replacement.

Yes, technical merit is important, but it is not the most important factor for most software

In every case you mention, I think you'll find the deciding factor was support. DOS won because it ran on any shitty generic PC clone. Windows won because of software support. Office won due to platform support for integration with other MS products. X86 won due to software support. ISA won due to industry support from multiple vendors. DirectX "won" (well, not really OpenGL is still alive and well for non-windows platforms and killing it in mobile with ES) due to MS platform and developer support.

Something to note for those in the Linux community who decide to flame people who are just trying to get their shit to work. Support will make or break your product, especially for business. It can have the shiniest bells and most aurally seductive whistles known to man, but if Bob at Initech can't call on someone when it breaks and actually get help, rather than insults, then it will not fly.

Even worse when the developers are actively hostile to particular classes of user (looking at you, Firefox).

And this kids, is why Linux will never enjoy significant market share on end user devices.

And yes, I'm sure someone will mention Android. Yeah sure, it's Linux. Just keep telling yourself that.

Nothing, unless they want people to actually contribute and spread the word. 1 user who gets screwed by an update = a heap of people told about how linux still isn't ready for prime time, and the support forums are full of assholes.

Does wonders for enticing companies to provide platform support.

Modded troll, but it's pretty true, albeit derogatory towards the second half. In the above time-frame, I've seen nowhere near as much breakage in FreeBSD. FreeBSD even ship compatibility shims in the ports system to enable older applications to work. Microsoft has managed compatibility far better, even apple has done a far better job, and they're probably the most likely vendor to break user-space apps out of the lot.

The above poster also forgot the ipfwadm/ipchains/iptables/nftables debacle - sure, FreeBSD has multiple firewalls but they're all supported and not deprecated from release to release.

install the rosetta @ home boinc project and predict and desing protein strucures.

perhaps Apple and google will ration their back end service such that a user of an old phone only gets the equivalent compute power that was available at the time the phone was first sold. Newer phones thus pay for upgrades in the computing infrastructure, and thus are entitled to superior backend services.

Studies have also shown that as humans age their rate of recall also slows down, not because their brains are slower but because they have to navigate a database filled with entangled excess information. I've noticed that google searches by voice are vastly more word-accurate than siri searches by voice. But that's because google is doing something in the context of something else-- it has clues to context. Siri is trying to do free-form semantics over a much greater realm of possibilities. When you narrow Siri to a phone specific function, it does better than google. As the AI realm grows, perhaps to include sarcasm and slang, these services will require even more compute power to keep going.

However, these days, phone services are done on back end servers, so there is no great reason they should slow down in "modern" times.

I installed crouton and it totally sucks!
1) you have to run in developer mode which means one accidental miss boot or wake up and you entire hard disk is erased.
2) you get no live updates from google for the chrome portion
3) crouton linux has all sorts of network adapter problems, like seeing it at all, on my machine.
4) the archiving system for saving your current state for a reinistall after you accidentally press the space bar when it tells you to at boot (and reformats the hard drive) is byzantine and only for very serious experts who think there time has no value (e.g. want to buy a cheap computer and then waste tonnes of their time learing the tricks.
5) printing is a total disaster, and at a minumum requires a real computer or a special printer.

OGG was too late. You don't just need to be open, you need to be solving problems that weren't solved years ago. MP3 was good enough. There are better replacements, but the hardware support hit the ground way before ogg or any of the alternatives were ready. People ripped all their stuff to mp3 way before the alternatives were ready.

The Vorbis/Vp8 guys don't need to be competing with h.264. That ship sailed years ago. They need to be beating the next generation of codec.