I don't have a UK specific story to tell, unfortunately, but you can read this American story where Uber lost in small claims court in no small part for their lack of cooperation with law enforcement after a client had his laptop stolen by his driver. Quoting from the article:

Sorry to reply so late in the discussion. I agree that, in retrospect, the Firefox OS makes a lot more sense than what I've given them credit for until now. With that said, I still think that Mozilla is not free of blame. They used to get massive amounts of money from Google (300 million in at least one year, I heard). They've been known to give relatively large compensations to their executives... My opinion is that, being a charity, they did not have the skills required to make something out of the money they were showered in, and the opportunity to become a major player on the Internet was squandered.

What these numbers seem to show is that most people tend to use the default browser that came with their phone. Those IE installs are probably running on Windows phones. I just don't see any browser in that list that seems like it's being installed because of its merits. The situation cannot be compared to the desktop, where Chrome is massively popular in a large extent because of the amazing visibility it gets on the Google homepage and that it can be installed easily even in corporate environments without administrative rights.

TLDR: In my opinion, Firefox is failing on the cellphone market because of the market structure more than anything else.

Does it even matter if Firefox has no users on iOS? I remember a /. discussion on this topic that happened some time ago... The gist of it was that the rendering engine used on iOS could not be changed, making all so called browsers on that platform little more than window dressing used to create brand awareness (except for Safari, of course). Has the situation changed?

Furthermore, a 200$ phone is also less likely to be stolen. Actually, anything else than an iPhone is less likely to be stolen.

I think you're both wrong (you and the OP), but at least the original argument had the merit that it would be trivial to demonstrate. Just plot the number of illegal immigrants vs the murder rate, and you'll see if there is a correlation. The point you make would be extremely difficult (and time consuming) to demonstrate. The regulatory landscape is very complex, and will often go both ways (restrict and relax) at the same time, making any analysis very difficult. Even if you only did this for the 20 largest cities in the US, it would still be a lot of work. Your two lines post goes nowhere near proving anything like that.

Good luck showing the causation link in that case too. I'm sure that will not prevent you from reaching whatever conclusion you like.

Post to undo moderation error.

The people who can accomplish their work with a cell phone indeed do not need multitasking, and have probably already switched over. A lot of jobs, however, require being able to see your email and interacting with some other application at the same (often the browser running some web app, I guess). Nearly all the staff in the company I work for is in that situation. If this is not multi tasking, I don't know what is.

I'm sorry to say that I completely disagree.

Most jobs don't require mobility. Thus, using their cellphone to do their work is not a particularly compelling use case. The operating systems running on cell phones are poorly suited to multitasking, and thus do not offer a particularly productive environment to work in when they are connected to a screen with a mouse and keyboard. Android has actually been moving away from larger screens, changing the UI to work better on cellphone screen sizes at the expense of tablet sized screens. In any case, it's already possible to get a desktop-like environment with a cell or tablet through the use of remote desktop, and I've yet to hear of a company that did the switch.

That honestly looks like a solution in search of a problem. If they don't know how to take a screenshot, they probably don't know/care what browser they're using, and the chances they're running Firefox at this point is extremely low.

You just don't understand what I meant to say. I was aware that all the applications he mentioned were obsolete. My point is that

- none of the examples he gave are important applications for the proper functioning of the OS. On the other hand, it's hard to use a Linux environment without a text editor. While you can point out that vi or nano are always there, these are not exactly ideal in a graphical environment so much (and vi requires a bit of knowledge to work). In any case the default editor now has to be replaced.
- These applications have been replaced by better stuff, different manners of working and so on and so forth. Encarta? You're better off going to Wikipedia.Windows messenger? Everyone had already left that ship. There's no point in Microsoft continuing to support applications whose userbase left long ago.

TLDR: Your post is a non sequitur. I understood what argle was saying; you didn't understand my post. WOOOSH.

I'll not reply to your full post, but I'll take a shot at your claim that Paint is getting discontinued. As a matter of fact, Microsoft finally decided to continue supporting it after people complained. Thus, they're willing to change their minds. In the case of gedit, you have to change the mind of one person, who probably doesn't have time to keep supporting it. This is much more difficult and unlikely to happen.

The examples you give are terrible. The reason these programs are not being made anymore is mostly that nobody was using them. Dropping support for gedit is more akin to Microsoft dropping support for Notepad. While I don't think Notepad is all that great, it is used very widely. While I think the wording of the GP statement makes it an obvious troll, I think he has a point. You see a lot of churn in some Linux distributions, where programs and important subsystems are frequently replaced by others which are not clearly superior. I think this is because developers working for free would rather work on their own code than fix programs made by someone else, which is perfectly understandable. It doesn't make for a consistent user experience though, and makes it painful to keep documentation up to date. I think this is what is going to happen in this case too.

It fits with some stories I read of him being a fan of Ayn Rand. His belief that Uber needs him to prop it up fits neatly with that. I almost wish he would get the CEO job back so that he can be at the helm when it finally sinks.