Microsoft should be doing everything in its power to make the one brand that people like to be the powerful, single name.

Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 930 ------------> the Nokia.

  "Let me Google it(*) on my Nokia". Metro/Modern/Surface/WinPhone -> NokiaOS. There are NO WINDOWS on the interface!

The next brand down they have is Skype.

The next version of Windows should be called Windows and actually be Windows and actually improved, and not Surface. That stream will just keep going but nobody likes it.

"Windows" shouldn't be going on phones, tablets, surfaces, anything else that doesn't need to be.

MacOS was hardly as tainted as Windows but Apple didn't say the iPhone was a Mac when it wasn't.

Microsoft has not ever understood one thing.

People ***HATE*** "Windows". Windows is associated with work, pain, crazy difficulties, nerds and viruses. The brand name has negative value.

So what does Microsoft do? They double and triple down on fucking *Windows*. They had the opportunity with the Metro to finally make people see Microsoft as going beyond Windows. "No this isn't Windows any more, it's not supposed to be Windows, and that's OK. We're more than Windows, so try it on its own terms".

And now with phones they kill the one name, Nokia, which people did have a good association with, in favor of a nothingburger which might as well be a suppository name.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=57

The ocean heat content is a better (though delayed) measure of global warming than the atmosphere for the obvious reason it has a larger heat capacity and so 'physically' integrates over many fluctuations.

Here's a great example. It's just denialism.

| The problem with the AGW consensus is that prediction has yet to coincide with observed reality. The Solar cycles hypothesis do coincide.

That's simply empirically false.

http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

| Once folks start actually (or accidentally) start "performing" science and investigate all possible theories instead of FOTM (or FOT decade) we might get greater clarity. As soon as we start to remove lies from reports, get equal peer review time and otherwise move away from irrational religious science and get back to hard science we will be much better off.

You imagine hard science hasn't been going on and there are "lies from reports". It's just not true. Many physical drivers, including solar influence (which IS included in every serious analysis).

This has been a field of serious study for 50 years. Roger Revelle wrote in a report to Lyndon Johnson about various environmental issues that he estimated the effect from increased greenhouse gases would be visible by 2000.

| But that too is reviled but the same advocates of AGW.

Firstly, scientists are an 'advocate' for global warming the way a physician is an 'advocate' for cancer.

Secondly, the intersection between actual scientists on global warming and "anti-nuclear activists" is far from 100%.

What' happening in Germany is a crime. For a supposedly mature and intelligent country, what they're doing is making solar and wind compete with nuclear. The empirical result is that coal burning & CO2 is staying the same or increasing, and expensively nuclear is going down and solar up.

Chivalry was also a man qualifying himself to the upper-class, powerful, father of the bride. Wealth and power that he would inherit for his own benefit should he marry the daughter. There was something in it for the man.

called a IRBM. The dynamically optimal solution is obviously to go up out of the atmosphere as soon as you can to reduce drag, and then come down over the target. And since you're coming down, you don't need any thrust in that phase. So you just re-invented the ballistic missile. Von Braun figured this all out quite some time ago.<br><br>All the "hypersonic weapons" are ballistic missiles with slightly maneuverable (nonballistic) warheads.

All IRBM's &amp; ICBM's have been hypersonic weapons since 1957.<br><br>How fast is a re-entry vehicle from a modern ICBM?<br><br>Here's what an attack looks like from the ground: hey, a moving bright white dot! (one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand) BOOM<br><br>It takes O(10) seconds to go from the top of the atmosphere to target level, three or four from stratosphere.<br><br>This is why missile defense is almost impossible.<br><br>Even in the video game (Missile Command) you always lose.

| Are they disappointed that the chairman of the FCC isn't just Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast?

Yes.

In fact, they are disappointed that the FCC exists as a nominally independent government institution. That they have to seduce potentially reluctant regulators, instead of the regulators sucking their cable ports with enthusiasm.

chutzpah and hypocrisy, go together like a horse

*) Federal government regulating over the desires of State legislatures: Evil! Evil! Evil!
*) State government regulating over the desires of municipal legislatures: Motherhood, Apple Pie and the American Way!

| Tablets have also failed in the market. Apple is the only vendor to have seen some success, but that was built more upon hype and the quasi-religious attitude that many people hold toward Apple devices, rather than out of any real need or use for such devices. Outside of a small number of niche use cases, people in general have found tablets to be useless.

The niche use cases are
a) reading email
b) sending messages
c) using web apps
d) watching movies
e) playing games

which as it turns out are very common.

However it's true that Microsoft doesn't have a huge play here on the terminal (tablet end), but it does on the service end.

It just means that now such software will be expected to be readable and usable (for some things) on a tablet terminal as well as a laptop terminal. There's plenty of traveling businessmen who might want to access a service application through a tablet (e.g sales force) that starts in 2 seconds when they're in the airport instead of using the whole laptop.

For Microsoft, tablets are not an opportunity to make hardware or sell operating systems (the total global revenue from tablet operating system sales is $0), but only as another terminal to hosted applications.

They should stick to writing business software. Instead of trying to fight and lose against very capable competitors in their primary niches, i.e. Google and Apple, they should compete in the space of general business software. There's much more opportunity beyond Office. Soft targets, for example all of Oracle's horrid non-database application software, where the standards are egregiously low, and make Office seem like a work from Michelangelo.

I'm a C++ programmer.

C++ is (usually) fast, bloated and almost impossible to fully understand.

Did Ergodan suddently think "Oh maybe Russia was right about Assad & Syria after all?"?

Yes, Turkey was a very reliable ally until Ergodan's Islamism. Ataturk was right all along.

That's exactly how Microsoft is going to thrive in the mobile-first world. By getting the fuck out.

Nadella knows what's up (i.e. Elop & Ballmer are tumors) and how they're not really capable.

But seriously, that's a smart idea, they're writing the software & hosting the infrastructure for the back end services.