The trick is not to make a show, but to make a good show. Quoting from the NY Times Netflix article:

It already knew that a healthy share had streamed the work of Mr. Fincher, the director of “The Social Network,” from beginning to end. And films featuring Mr. Spacey had always done well, as had the British version of “House of Cards.” With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming.

How does Netflix know all this from its 33 million subscribers? Big Data of course.

Despite the fact that HP paid too much for Autonomy, the reasons for the acquisition are still valid. The increasing ability to store large amounts of data means that big data is big and there are many big players entering the fray. For example, Intel:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/intels-big-data-push/

Many industries benefit from Big data mining. Netflix's new series 'House of Cards' was developed based on data Netflix collected about its users to determine what they liked and it has proven to be a success:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cards-using-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Of course lets not forget the dark side of big data, the NSA and FBI can use the vast volume of data they collect to create statistical profiles of the average American. Any American outside the average is obviously going to be a target for additional investigation.

By far the biggest bottleneck is battery life not just for laptops but for civilization in general. My Lenovo X230 is fast, light, has decent resolution and is perfect for my job. The biggest problem is battery life, I'm good for 4-5 hours but this number drops every time I go through a discharge/recharge cycle and eventually end up with 20 minutes of battery life. Industry is focused on developing lower-power hardware to extend battery life but we really need a revolution in battery power storage and re-usability.

I think that as a company matures it is forced to find additional sources of revenue and often this revenue comes from those that are locked in i.e. its customers. Ubuntu's granddaddy - Debian is a good way to skip all the ad-ware that Ubuntu is starting to add.

Chrome and Android are very different OS. Chrome is designed to run off the web on lightweight hardware using a keyboard/mouse while Android has a touch interface and runs on essentially mini-computers and needs to be able run offline. Combining them is going to give you something like Win 8 - neither one nor the other but a giant mess.

They have to make money somehow. I've had no issues using Ubuntu and it is one of the few distros that is easy to use and set up.

I wonder what happened to Red Flag Linux? Red Flag was China's official Linux distro and was supposed to replace Microsoft Windows. Interesting that China is partnering with a U.S. company when they are trying to be independent in all other arenas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux