Cell phone providers literally don't need to lift a finger to activate new service, yet they routinely sock people for $50.

Office 2007 was the first implementation of the "Fluent" UI, but it is not necessarily the best. This is the doc that convinced me to use the ribbon for a UI redesign:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5ae8ea78-6ba9-4de4-aabd-2616d010caa7&displaylang=en

The goals of the Fluent UI design matched our needs almost perfectly. I think it works better for us than it does for Office. Many things seem rushed or forced in the Office 2007 implementation of the ribbon. Maybe Office 2010 will better deliver.

(It is interesting to note that this doc talks about the ribbon being custiomizable by the user, which is decidedly NOT the case in Office.)

With MPEG-style video compression, it's not just the CPU cycles for encoding that's the problem, it's the way the codec itself works. A great deal of the data reduction comes from most frames being based on frames before and *after* it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures

The output stream is always several frames behind the source stream. You can eliminate predictive frames, but your compression is largely the same as JPEG stills at that point. So your choices are: looks bad, uses way too much bandwidth, or has too much lag to be usable for most types of games.

Even if the technology was there to support it, what's the point? "Buy this so you'll never have to buy anything else" stuff is always just snake oil.

Excellent points, but another that is often overlooked is how Flash would perform on a mobile processor.

It's a serious CPU hog -- Even a Pentium-4 PC can't keep up with all sorts of sites/apps. Performance on any mobile processor would suck hard. Surely that's part of the reason NO ONE has it.

For me, the "real web" is the part that doesn't use Flash. Except for a few video sites, I've missed it maybe twice in almost a year of putzing around with an iPhone. A basic SFV player and a few sites that integrate with it would take care of the video, and then I wouldn't miss Flash at all. I can live without homestarrunner for short periods of time.