Are you a wizard from the past?!

Preorder bonuses typically.

Apptrackr is. Apptrackr shut down which made Installous pointless since that was the repository that Installous pulled from. As far as I understand they are/were owned by different people, but in either case, it's a case of Apptrackr being gone and the frontend made for it being useless.

Funny how this comes from a community that complains about walled gardens and vendor lock-in.

The NOAA uses birds? Great. Now PETA is going to lobby even harder.

Dell's Cherries?

Your totes being a grammer nazi right now.

So how are you paying rent?

Pistols at dawn.

...Which is exactly what you're doing here. You're giving the money to charity and receiving games as a thank you present, if you MUST think of it that way.

It's not P2W by any stretch of the imagination. It's P2LookPretty and P2PlayCertainPvPModes. Call me when they start requiring RL money monthly to maintain the items you spent a few thousand dollars on already.

It's not a WoW clone either - not any more than any MMO could be a clone of other MMOs, anyway. Quest system is different (not for the better, IMO,) game plays differently, mechanics are as different as they could possibly get for a MMO. It's just a different game.

It's not a good game, though. It's dreadfully boring to play and aimless unless you just intend on doing PvP and even then, PvP in all of its incarnations in GW2 is a zerg fest EXCEPT for structured, tournament PvP.

Because his opinion doesn't match yours he's now a troll? Is there anybody in the world that isn't a troll to you? You seem to think everybody who disagrees with you is one.

I'll agree to that, actually. Microsoft isn't exactly a company that plays nice.

Excel was actually always an in-house Microsoft thing. Originally it was called Multiplan and was actually very popular for a while. Like the poster mentioning Word, it's a contemporary of its main competition, not a copy.

IE was originally a licensed and rebranded version of one of the old mosaic browsers. I'm sure the name is on the wiki somewhere, but it was definitely not attempting to clone what would be the Gecko engine.

The fact is, Microsoft has always tried to compete, not copy. They've tried to do things better than the competition and not exactly like it. Like any company, they've had their share of failures and successes, but it's DEFINITELY not fair to say Microsoft has been riding the coattails of anybody - especially not in the modern day where its success was mostly through buyouts of very successful, good pieces of software. Every large company does this.

None of this, however, hides the fact that the Metro interface is awful for desktops and trying to force it on the desktop in order to force users to use their app store is and already has sewn some seeds of contempt. Microsoft is definitely making a HUGE gamble on this and arguably a mistake as well.

You could, but why do it like this in the first place when you can just do it through the native software? I understand using OSS as a part of your ethos, but you have to understand that not everybody shares that ethos - they just want to get their work done.