We don't actually depend on them though. In some places, they're creating new markets, which if they prove viable, will then have competition from other areas. In some places, they're simply competing against other companies for space in an existing market.
Now, if Google became mandated by the world's governmental organisation and granted eternal monopoly, I'd have a problem with it, but so far, I don't find much that they do (apart from the depth of the data gather) even remotely related to a dystopic world. Unless you include 'Brave New World', and that's not your usual dystopia.

Except it doesn't work that way. By having your game _require_ that feature, you've shifted the demographic that it appeals to. The rest of the numbers you gather entirely miss out the tranche you've alienated, but doesn't show that in the figures.
The most important strategy is to get games out there and sold. If you don't have revenue, you don't have a company. Sure, it's _nice_ to know more, but if it affects the bottom line of getting the games sold, then it should be a "No".
What companies don't understand is that changes of mindset are glacial; they don't fit into the strategy of "how much can we screw out of people in the next 3 years".
Fine, in those 3 years, you make a fair bit of money, but you alter the perception of your customer base (from one of "I can accept this bargain" to more of "I'll think very carefully about dealing with them again"). Once opinion has shifted, it's a pain to get it back as that change has a lot of inertia, and that will result in a lot of sales that aren't made as people find something else to spend the money on. If it's not there now, it will be; maybe it'll be going back to the more traditional things that have temporarily been put aside.. And on a shift like that, it's highly possible to have a company destroying trend (or at least, very damaging).
So, the "immediately test out different advertising strategies" is really "test out different immediate advertising tactics" rather than "test out a strategy that'll give us long term prospects".
Thinking short term is always a huge gamble. Sometimes it pays off.. When it doesn't, it wreak havoc on a wide scope.

Depends on your quantum spin.

Except you can sell on a car, and it'll run on the fuel you put into it.
What's actually happening is that companies are attempting to make sure that after the initial sale, if your logic worked as you were intimating with that analogy, the car wouldn't work by putting the correct fuel in it, unless you'd paid to have the car unlocked by the original company that manufactured it. And this company enforced a set of rules that ensured it got a massive share of the original price of the car just to perform an administrative function of saying "Yes, you now own the car".
Now, none of your friends would be able to drive it unless you paid the fee to this company, so there'd be no lending it to someone for the weekend while you didn't need it, and it covered their car being in for repairs or something. You couldn't give it away, without the authority of this company (who you'd have to pay for the privilege of giving it away, even though you'd purchased it and now were the owner by law).
So, in effect, you'd not be buying a "car", as that describes a vehicle that moves when you put fuel in it. You'd be buying an expensive heap of junk that you'd need to pay a third party (who has no legal right to be involved in the resale of the car, apart from them putting a 'tracking' system of owner in there that won't let the heap of metal do anything, even open the doors, unless you pay them this money).
Unless you can play this game, as is, on the console, you can't describe it as a game for the console, because it isn't. It's a medium with data on it. That data is not a game, and can't be described as one, because if you put it in the console with the expectation that it'd work, you'd find it didn't. That doesn't meet the criteria for being described as a workable game.

It'd be a very interesting fight if people took it up en masse; I don't think it's as cut and dried as you make out.

You know the NHS in the UK uses exchange, right? That's a pretty sizable organisation. The message loss there is zero, and it's trusted to send some pretty important (i.e. potentially life and death) information.
Oh, and turnaround is pretty much seconds too.. Not a Microsoft fan here, but it really does sound like your exchange admins didn't have a clue. If you had admins, and it wasn't a company that let some 'external' entity set up a bodge job on the cheap, and just let it run unattended because "they didn't see the point in having anyone look after a machine that just sends email"..

Education is the root of all change. If you don't have people who really 'get' how to do things, and are competitive, you'll end up with everything else failing (as the people who are in the positions of power aren't educated sufficiently to really 'get' how things link together, thus they'll mess up all the rest).
An interesting thing happening in the UK now is a greater and greater acceptance of an International Baccalaureate; that means an end to the "We're getting better marks" brigade that constantly said that exam results were improving, but not taking into account that exams were getting easier. By being compared directly to an international paper, it forces a far more competitive environment (and wider recognition of the achievements).

For those that have even a fragment of history, you'll remember that the middle east used to be a center of learning and science.
In the days of the crusades, their scientific knowledge far outstripped that of Europe (there's a reason the numerals we use today are called "arabic numerals".
So, what happened to change that? Did Europe suddenly invest massively in science to go toe to toe? Alas not. Religious zealots got in places of power, and started to dictate that the progress of science was "against the will of god" (as the priesthood didn't understand it, so it scared them, and anything that scares a religious zealot is "against the will of god"). The role of religion in Europe started to lessen, allowing scientific method to progress apace and advancement to occur.

There's a reason ethics committees exist for scientific projects; the lay-people on them are a voice for the average person: They force the people doing pure science to think carefully about ramifications of performing experimentation in a particular fashion (is the experiment ethical? Can the way it's performed in a different way, not affecting the core of the theory, that is ethical?). The professionals are there to ensure the science is actually valid and to pick out the ones sloppily created that are mathematically wrong, or are unable by structure to draw the conclusions they're looking for from the experiments performed.

I'm vaguely hopeful that this incursion of zealotry into the workings of scientific progress can be rooted out and cast aside, but from the path that the US has been following towards a combination between a corporate feudalism headed by a close to a theocracy (what are the chances of an atheist being elected president these days, since the pledge of allegiance was altered in 1954 to include the "under god" segment; no, for you younger ones, that wasn't part of the original, and was tagged on for political ends), it's not a certainty. That's somewhat worrying really.

$168k for a technician? Fully loaded in Europe, you're probably looking at about $40k for a full loading on tech resource necessary to diagnose and fix this kind of problem.
You don't necessarily need config control to do a fix, though that would likely entail one later on through the sysops and change control processes worked into the standard working day.
There are so many inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in that post that it really did give me a chuckle.

Actually, on the 'always on', the legitimate players hate it too.. And those of us that have been gaming since the early 80s (hell, the late '70s), we've seen companies come and go, so there's no expectation that they'll still be hosting a game you may just want to play in another 30 or so years (there are still ones that I'll pull out and play after nearly 20 years, just for the nostalgia trip and the fun of rediscovering forgotten stories).

There's network outages, routing problems, straight denial of service attacks (or compromises of the login servers creating mayhem), playing on a train, a plane, or even in a campsite (I actually enjoy camping; gets me to some very strange places, and a laptop is great for the rainy days; usually used for on site photo manipulation of the shots I take out and about).
Online only, for most games, is an artifical single point of failure. It'll mess up a product you paid for with no warning, and possibly irrevocably, all out of your control, with you having absolutely no recourse. That, to me, is an incredibly bad deal. If it's a bad game, then people will be less likely to buy from them again (exacerbated by the online only issues, meaning an even smaller available market, possibly making the difference between surviving as a company and going under). You don't care about the longevity, but you're left with a bad taste.
If it's a great one, then it's not going to be around for the nostalgia trip. When gaming lines are shut down by an active company, then players will be more wary still.
For all the 'big business' groups, thinking that this solves all their piracy woes, they'll be meeting the laws of unintended consequences, where games that don't follow this will have the exposure, thus the following (maybe not immediately, but eventually).. The following generates the sales. The sales bring in the cash, and cash is the lifeblood of a company.
Best analogy of the companies following this route is "Emo". It's very much an "I'll cut myself because I don't like a few people". Not the hard core self harmers who are actually ill, but the ones who'll do it for attention and because they think it'll make them edgy, or gain an advantage, whereas in the long run, it'll likely turn out to be self defeating, pointless and rather embarrassing.

It was a camera malfunction, according to the fanzine.. The fanfic of the time had Avon surviving.. And I think Villa too..

Still got the fanzines from the original run.. Hopefully this time, they won't get a camera malfunction for the last scene in the whole series!

Yes, I understand Capitalism fairly well.
Communism, in its truest sense, is the utopia form of society, being very inclusive. The biggest problem with it is human nature, which pretty much ensures that it'll be subverted and exploited. It's what we should be working towards as a species (until something better can be formulated, which it probably will at some point).
Capitalism is confrontational and warlike, and very exclusive. It's an evolution of the strongest (not necessarily the optimum) under certain constraints, many of which are part of the system itself. It's quite destructive in many ways, doesn't often hit the optimum strategies for the species wide constraints, but is very much in tune with current human behaviour (we're still a pretty primitive, warlike species).
In the wider scale, at the moment, I'd choose Capitalism over Communism, simply because it works, right now. However, I'm hopeful that someday we'll be better than that.

The problem being that many of the people invoking it, and not having a real understanding of it, manage to get other people in court and charged with offenses anyway.

Why do you think Citrix did so well, and the whole application virtualisation stack? RDP and VNC are ok for some things, but they simply lack the power, elegance and utility of network transparency.

Why do so many people pay for Citrix, and VDI?