Its finally catching up with them now. They got away with it because they were pretty much the only viable game in town. They fucked up the tablet market, and their phone market, and people have real choices in those areas. But people think of MS as the crap company that pushes crap. And who wants a phone or a tablet from a company that is a known, certified crap dealer. Its quite fun to watch all this though, I gotta say.

IF? The problem is there are multiple IT related industries being "supported" by the fuxor syndrome, that is known as "windows". But its accepted, and has become expected. Yea, its very hard to sell "free", but not so hard to sell a guarantee or whathaveyou. The "free" thing does not really have a salesman or account rep.

Uh, Android, Apple, or anything with a web browser. SaaS, Cloud, etc. Not to say that works for every use case, but every use case used to be a windows pc. Plenty of work environments are using tablets (ipads) now as either replacements for pc's or supplements to them, making the pc less important. And the whole point of the article is that the demotion of the ms based pc is a pretty significant trend. Does MS go away completely? Of course not. Are they earning significant less than they would have if things were going their way? Surely. Are they the dominant player across the board that they once were?

You must be the target audience then. The rest of the planet, or most of us anyway, are not.

Don't say that too loudly. A certain degree of illusion is necessary to maintain order.

Yea, but I only do bugs once a month. On Tuesdays. I can't be bothered before then. Your problems may seem big, but I choose to do things my way, at my pace. Besides my inaction helps support a large secondary market for security appliances, IT support personnel and the like. We jeopardize an entire sector of the economy by undermining these people.

Huh?

Cross viral contamination is always a possibility.

Buy a ms product and expect not to get shit on? Ah, come on! W phones should come with toilet paper.

Sure they *can*. Anyone *can*. But either they have to rebuild and redeliver the app to do that, assuming the devices pull the content directly. That buys them an hour or two before someone notices. Or if its fed via ms infrastructure, then its even easier.

Sure, why not? Tis better to fuck than be fucked. And MS has done plenty of fucking already.

Really? Presumably via request headers or other fingerprinting techniques. If they wanted to be real jerks (like remember when MS required an IE user agent string just to access microsoft.com?), they could just start disallowing this traffic now.

... but this is Microsoft.

I totally agree. If you at the point where you are needing / wanting node and the like, then spin up a linux image, and install whatever you want. You don't need a traditional hosting company at all. The cost of AWS is negligible in this scenrario (and free for a yr as mentioned), the benefits are great, assuming you have the wherewithal to install and play with stuff like node.