I (as an architect/developer) and my business users love agile. For me, it's all about identifying requirement changes ASAP to minimize rework. Would you rather a requirement change before you work on it or after? The user thinks they know what they want but it's so abstract as a bunch of thoughts in their mind that they can't possibly identify every detail. But put a tangible product in front of them and a lot of what they want changes. It's inevitable.

So for me, I want the user to see the work ASAP so we can proactively identify these changes before we've wasted a bunch of time doing the wrong stuff. Our users totally bought in so it's like having one day iterations instead of the two weeks that we had before. I suppose YMMV with the user and technical team.

Which is why somebody else is supposed to step up and assume their responsibility temporarily. It's the exact same thing that would happen in any other methodology.

Two things:
1. Do you work in a silo exclusively? I can't believe that others' work doesn't affect yours and your work doesn't affect others.
2. Nothing in Agile says you can only raise an issue during the scrum. That's either a silly trumped up example or your co-workers are imbeciles.

We're not talking about the same types of attacks though. I think it's safe to assume all major governments conduct military and diplomatic espionage. However, the US complaint is that the Chinese military is conducting industrial espionage and gives the stolen secrets to their own industry.

Indeed but they have the "build it and they will come" delusion of selling tens of millions of tablets. If desktop Metro really sucks that bad then the PR uproar will force Microsoft to make it optional for keyboard and mouse.

Well if we want to go down this hypothetical path then Android could have Google + Device Manufacturer + Carrier spying. That would be three Android spies vs iPhone's one.

Battery life aside, I imagine it would be incredibly painful to use a desktop application on a tablet. In a roundabout way, maybe this will devs will make some effort redesign desktop apps to fit the form factor.

I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone but even I have to cut them some slack for the first update to essentially a version 1 product.

A few problems off the top of my head:

1) This requires large speculative investor to have a huge position in order to pull this off. We'd see at least an 8K filed with the SEC if MS were to purchase this position and a ridiculous amount of articles in the press. Also, the MS board wouldn't approve paying a huge premium for a loser company when they could just sign a regular 'ol licensing deal like with their other WP7 partners.

2) Large speculative investor would make much more money with a hostile takeover and then a breakup of the company.

3) WP7 partners would be pretty pissed if MS took an ownership interest in Nokia.

I too have complaints about the article but the omission of Windows CE is not one of them. That was a big player in the Pocket PC handheld space but a handheld is clearly not a tablet. Microsoft's tablet strategy was to shoehorn in Windows proper and neither that nor attempts at Windows CE tablet ever gained any traction. Windows Embedded was targeted at POS and field devices so it has even less place in a tablet article.

I'm going out on a limb and saying Bing's merits have little to do with this deal. Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook in 2007 so of course Facebook is going to be drinking their Kool-Aid.

Are you for real? +3 Informative? Net neutrality is about making sure Internet access providers do not discriminate against content providers which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you think it is.

Amen. I'm a former subscriber to both WSJ and IBD. WSJ front page was worthwhile and IBD charts were awesome but the rest of those papers were pretty much one big op-ed section. Still searching for suitable replacements.

Picking nits here but people subscribe to WSJ and FT for business, economic and financial news. General news organizations just don't devote enough resources to do a good job covering those specialized topics. "Stock information" in the form of publicly available data is free from Yahoo, Google, CNBC, TheStreet.com and plenty other sites.

Mod up! I've used pretty much every Microsoft OS since DOS 3.x and many of their development and enterprise products. Clearly things have gotten tremendously better over that time but I long ago stopped trusting them after decades of dealing with mediocre products, Linux FUD attacks and DOJ investigation shenanigans. There's really nothing they can do now to reverse that.