But .. where is Microsoft? Out of the picture - or geographical issue?

Sorry but Martians used the metric system.

Are you sure about that? According to the main page FAQ (bottom)
Is there any soy in Soylent?
Hardly any. Please see blog.soylent.me for a preliminary ingredient list, once the formula is finalized we will be releasing the official Soylent v1.0 ingredients/nutritional breakdown.

This. Same experience here. Two Caviar HD fell within ten days, after a year of utilization. Until 4 years ago, Seagate has always been, for me, the best maker in terms of reliability and quietness (didn't buy any HD since).

Simple. Don't trademark "candy" to trademark "candy" ; trademark "candy" to have people talk about you.

Accenture (and the like) image in IT departments (technical side) is often illustrated thanks to some jokes, like the famous Why did the chicken cross the road?. While the IT department usually delivers practical and tangible services, these "consulting companies" made their way up to the management. The management, IT illiterate, is always keen on overpaying some comforting but useless lengthy overpriced reports from such a consulting company, stacked later on at the bottom of a cabinet, having a sticky note inserted on page 3/1000, page where the reader gave-up reading. Useless reports aimed at influencing high level decisions at the management level, that may not have a direct or lethal impact on IT productivity. Besides the heavy cost embedded in the management budget, usually no one really cares. The problem arises when a big entity, IT illiterate, does not have a solid IT structure yet, and assigns full responsibility to such a "consulting company" to manage a new IT service, from A to Z.

memset is part of the dev library - i.e. unlike the 'for' loop, when the processor or whatever other component allows a faster initialization, memset is likely to be rewritten to use that new feature, while the compiler - depending on the 'for' loop content - may not be able to guess the mere initialization, and may not use that new proc feature.

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
...
return 0;
}

That extra bit is certainly much less than all the games you played and porn you visited over that same period.

Isn't that obvious? It shouldn't be a wish, it is a requirement (Even Ubuntu does that).

We're talking about security updates, ie updates of security products.

Hackers have to wait another year before showing their talent..
On a more serious note, it seems Microsoft, as often, didn't think through the process: halting XP security support in the blink of an eye would open a non closing door to security threats highly harmful to the company image. They gave XP another year, probably to build new update plans from XP to 7 / 8 (...) that would allow more/most companies to migrate in the meantime.

In all fairness, there is a reason: Ballmer was promoted due to Gates ego syndrome, different from Peter principle: promote people who may not have you look bad after you leave the company.

If Apple is 50% algorithms powerful + 50% design, Google is more something like 90% algorithms. What kind of complexity is the search algorithms, in your opinion? And Google Maps? There is a reason if nobody has reached that level yet. Google acquiring Nest is a good thing, as this should improve their - currently poor - design abilities.