Can you provide a metric by which Balmer shows success?

No growth over 12 years while your direct competitors have soared is terrible. You can't blame events that happened to everyone in the field. By not growing, Microsoft is losing. By only copying products and ideas rather than self-innovate they are just doing enough not to drop dead in their tracks. I'm not a fan of their products precisely for this reason. They're knock-offs when I can pay the same or less and get apple or google devices. Forever catching up is not a business strategy, it's a death-by-10,000 cuts strategy.

I think that's what we use to charge the iPad.

Names are generally applied to products... rarely having anything directly to do with the product itself. The philosophy behind doing that is up for debate, but unrelated here. I'm more curious as to why having Apple's logo on a stove would do anything to increase sales of that stove. It's definitely not an iPhone, or made by Apple. Are they actually fooling people into thinking it's an Apple product or better yet, an actual iPhone? Surely not..

Did it really work to increase sales of a gas stove? Would sticking an apple logo on something just automatically increase sales in China?

Management will always disapprove of solitude and independent employees because they can't take credit for the work completed and justify making higher salaries than those who actually spawn the good ideas and do great work.

So IE it is?

I carry my iPad with me everywhere for business and for entertainment, not to mention browsing Slashdot. I also game more than I care to admit. I've played many a tablet games, and to be honest.. it's NOT a gaming platform, at least not in the current form.

If they could use a controller, absolutely. But multi-touch gaming is just not convenient. A few games can pull it off and last the test of time, but nothing that's in the market that GameStop caters to. The controller is a MUST and it may make the machine a killer device, a portable console that doesn't suck.

Same reason some people call it "Macoss Ecks". What boggles me is that you could be a Slashdot reader, and get an OS's name wrong after it's been out a decade.

Apple has had tools to do this for free on the mac for old .img floppy files since the mid 90s at least. It just wasn't included in the base OS with the advent of checksum-enhanced dmgs till OS X. Your credit to Linux is a little mistaken.