HP at this point has no identity. They tried selling off their PC division while publicly saying there was no future for the PC market, which was fucking idiotic. Way to devalue what you're trying to sell off. They abandoned their WebOS investment way too early and never captured developer interest even for a moment. They still make good servers and laptops, but they don't own those markets.

Either HP makes a bold move to salvage the mess up to this point, or they die out.

That's their IM platform which goes through RIM's servers. The email goes through your Exchange/whatever mail servers.

A few points that come to mind:

* Detailed alerting rules. I don't want every email waking me up in the middle of the night, but I can configure a rule for an audible alert with specific emails when I'm on call.
* Detailed filtering rules.
* Search that's worth a damn.
* Being able to delete all emails that fit those search results.

That's part of what spurred the thought process. I think HP and Google could work together to integrate some WebOS UI concepts into Android to improve it.

HP is convinced they need to embrace the 'post-PC' world. They could actually salvage part of their 2 billion investment of Palm and Web OS. BB has a terrible platform right now and is dying, but they have a great brand name, and some great apps. Their mobile email client is absolutely the best.

If HP was smart, they'd reach out to Google to help develop Android phones and tablets with some Web OS influence (some great UI concepts actually) and a BB email client. Honestly, wouldn't that be a legit Apple killer than enterprise shops would embrace en-masse?

Shortly after Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban, they not only allowed female voters for the first time ever, but they elected female officials. I don't live in Afghanistan, but I'd be hesitant to suggest violent oppression of women is the predominant view, even if it was practiced by the Taliban previously. Sometimes a violent minority rules the masses, but does not reflect the views of the people.

I assume the education slant would appeal to nerds. Nerds should be pro-education and should be concerned about literally violent anti-education movements.

.NET never was that huge for desktop apps for most users, but it is HUGE in the enterprise world. HTML5 is the path for Metro tile apps, but Microsoft isn't abandoning all their enterprise customers with internal apps. .NET isn't going away. Mono in theory could allow these customers to shift to Linux, but I'm not sure anyone has really tried that.

Many Microsoft sites that used Silverlight have moved to HTML5, and Microsoft is telling Silverlight developers to embrace HTML5.

Windows Server 2012 is the name of the new server product that will ship at the end of the year.

Windows 7 has pretty good adoption in the enterprise market. And while most shops didn't deploy Vista on the desktop, they were buying Vista licenses with a downgrade to XP. Microsoft didn't lose money or market share. I imagine that many shops will purchase Windows 8 licenses as soon as it ships, with a Windows 7 downgrade and actually deploy 7 on the desktop.

For years people have said the PC market is dead and no one will purchase PCs anymore because netbooks are around, or smartphones, or tablets. But more most people, these devices supplement a PC. They don't fully replace a PC.

PC sales haven't suffered, and PCs certainly aren't disappearing in the enterprise market (where Microsoft really makes bank).

Will Best Buy continue to sell Windows desktops? Yes. Will enterprise shops still buy Windows desktops and servers almost exclusively? Yes. It doesn't matter. As much as Windows ME was a disaster, it didn't affect market share. As much as Vista was a turd, it didn't affect market share.

Even if people started replacing desktop apps with web apps, they still need an OS on their desktop/laptop.

Furthermore, as much as I don't care for Microsoft's business tactics, and as much as I love Linux, I think Microsoft will actually GAIN market share with the new Window Server 2012 while companies like VMWare and Citrix will be losing business.

Buffet bailed out his local paper first. I worked there. It was "employee" owned in that you could buy stock, but the stock had to stay with the company and usually when the company got rid of people, the executives kept just awarding more and more stock to themselves. They kept paying themselves huge bonuses and talked publicly about record profits, but they maintained the profits by layoffs and pay cuts followed by more layoffs and pay cuts.

The publisher/CEO told me that the thought the internet wouldn't affect the newspaper industry at all. It was the same as radio and TV before it.

He also bragged about how proud he was of the newspaper's legacy of enacting change in the community via propaganda. When Nebraska was being considered for the first legal casinos outside of reservations, Atlantic City and Vegas, the World-Herald ran front page stories daily about how gambling was evil and would immediately destroy any metropolitan area it was in. So the casinos built right across the river in Iowa. Iowa has been rolling in tax revenue since then, while all the money comes from Omaha. The casinos haven't destroyed our city, but we missed out on all the tax revenue thanks to the paper. I also spoke to a reporter whose assignment was literally to slander someone running for city council in Lincoln, Nebraska as much as possible. He owned a sex toy company, which was against the morals of the paper, and they felt it was their duty to bury the guy. Oddly enough, the paper didn't have morals when it came to abusing employees and laying them off.

The company was run exceedingly poorly. Oddly enough, most of the suggestions I made to improve the company were implemented about two years later when the newspaper was somewhat forced to embrace the digital era.

Google News has said they'd share revenue with newspapers who feed them stories. And I specifically frequent news sites that have good writers and good view points. You can run a successful newspaper, though the physical product may eventually die out. It is a shame that Buffet is bailing out poorly run companies, because the same corrupt executives who lined their pockets as they laid everyone off just got rewarded for their behavior so it can continue some more.

The DMCA was aimed at stopping piracy, but reaches too far. Circumventing copyright protections (DRM) for any reason is illegal according to the DMCA. If SecuROM is hosing your computer and you need to fix your computer by removing SecuROM, then you just broke the law even if you made no effort to pirate software.

Pystar wasn't pirating copies of OS X. They were buying copies and reselling them, and a judge ruled that since they bypassed DRM to get the software to install, that means they weren't protected by first-sale doctrine, which is backwards. First-sale doctrine should have protected them and said that they had the right to do what they wanted with the software and hardware they purchased. However, thanks to the DMCA, Pystar does not have the right to circumvent DRM for any reason.

Terrible analogy.

Let's say the pizza shop demanded that you eat their pizza on their plate, and their plate alone. You have plates at home, or you could buy other plates cheaper elsewhere. The only thing stopping you from placing their pizza on your plate was their license, and judges don't find this to be anti-competitive behavior. This is the same federal government who said Microsoft didn't have the right to bundle Windows Media Player, and Microsoft wasn't forcing people to use it, or preventing people from using other media players. The government demanded that Microsoft support interoperability and not bundle. But they do support Apple whose behavior is far more anti-competitive than Microsoft's.

That's my point. By placing the DMCA above all other relevant laws, Atari v. Activision would be ruled differently. I don't like this new precedent and what it bodes for the future.