Wait, we think the iPad is a "premium experience"?

Nice try, Apple marketing guy.

It's funny that all these people are calling bullshit on Eclipse taking 500 meg of RAM, when I was thinking that I've never personally seen it use that little.

I think this is dead on.

Google went through a few year phase of greenlighting every internal idea that moved, but look at where they were at as a company: all of their eggs were in the search/ad basket, and they didn't want them to be. They were flush with cash and wililng to pay a high premium to add diversity to their offerings and be a little more future safe.

Even if they threw away 99 projects for every 1 that bore some kind of fruit to do so, I can't with confidence say that, for that company at that time, they made a bad trade there.

I'm not saying you're for 100% sure wrong, but having spent several years of my life working for one of the two aforementioned large American shipping companies, I have my doubts that you're right. The numbers and profitability on these things have shifted a lot over time.

To give you one easy example, gasoline costs at least twice what it did before FedEx's USPS contracts.

Interesting side note: for some zip codes, private couriers and the USPS and FedEx are all involved in handling a single package from pickup to destination. Good luck tracking that one online.

Because most companies, even ones that probably should have a robust data warehouse, don't.

Oh, the stories I could tell you of Fortune 500 companies whose entire record of swaths of financial and historical information reside in Access 97 databases even though the company is using Oracle for other things. Well, the stories I could tell you, NDAs notwithstanding.

Point being, if an area of the country has low enough population density that delivering there is unprofitable, FedEx doesn't. (Or, rather, they'll turn the package over to the local USPS for final delivery.)

Whereas the USPS isn't allowed to say: "Fuck Montana. We're losing money delivering mail there. Let's just focus on cities instead."

You can, but in a large amount (square mile-wise, not necessarily percentage of parcel wise) of the country, FedEx or UPS will hand the parcel over to the local USPS for final delivery.

Honestly, love or hate the USPS, anyone who's spent a year working for FedEx or UPS can tell you that neither is even remotely close to being realistically set up to replace it, much less profitably.

That's not safe, really, in that both UPS and FedEx use the US Postal Service as the final deliverer for their cheapest (and therefore what you tend to get any time an online store offers you cheap or free shipping) shipping option.

Being that you know what you're doing and can admit it, I really can't criticize you.

None of those (excepting Java, which you also disdain) is especially good for writing the kind of internal custom apps that any company of any size has hundreds of.

Which, maybe isn't an area you care about, but in my market there's way more good pay / good benefits / good working conditions work of that kind out there than there are people to do it.

Anything I've written this year, I could write in C or C++, for example. It wouldn't have been as good as fast (which is important, because a day of paying me costs more than all the Microsoft licenses my work will use), but it could be done. Business tends to care about good and fast a lot more than open standards or the assorted advantages (and there are advantages, I don't deny that) of open source.