Well.. Whales have a vestigial pelvis. Somehow the author, editor, and whoever else they have reviewing news stories failed to recognize the glaring mistake.

When MS was any kind of notable player in the smartphone/smart device marketplace, it was an incredibly small marketplace. Honestly, other than perhaps acting as some sort of inspiration for Apple, I don't think it had substantial influence on what came later. And frankly, I think the Blackberry was probably a much larger inspiration.

Ultimately, Apple learned a lot of useful lessons from the monster success that was the original iPod, and then saw how those lessons could be applied to a smartphone. RIM and Microsoft released mobile offerings that were functional, could run a wide variety of software, and certainly had some penetration in the enterprise, but Apple made sure iOS wasn't just a business workhorse (in fact, I see little evidence that it gave a damn about the enterprise at all), but rather a very consumer friendly device and then marketed it with astonishing brilliance. But at the end of the day, Apple's success with iOS is down to the original iPod. It gained its killer product, and built the iPhone and the iPad on the same premise.

The XBox division is only profitable in the sense that it no longer needs massive cash injections to keep it alive. It is a long ways from paying off the huge outlay of cash that Microsoft made to push it into the market.

You're not serious, right? The overwhelming majority of the market has completely ignored it, and from what I can tell, most of its alleged users are paid shills.

It makes sense if that market is at least partially responsible for eroding one of their key markets. While iOS and Android are not completely responsible for the substantial drop in PC sales, the rise of the smart device has played a substantial role. If Microsoft cannot find a way to insert itself into this market, then its long term outlook on the consumer end of the business is cast in substantial doubt.

It's clear by the introduction of a (heavily crippled) Office variant for Android and iOS that they are ultimately willing to surrender to the temptation to once again put a version of Office on a platform it does not control. It did so with Mac, but Macs have always been bit players so I don't think that represents the kind of shift MS is prepared to pursue now. It's the first sign that the company is prepared to cede market dominance to Android and iOS, and get its piece of the pie by releasing some variant of Office, which is the company's backbone.

It's still just dipping its toe in the water, but I suspect over the next couple of years you're going to see major shifts in how MS views its consumer offerings. From what I can tell, there is a growing ill sentiment among shareholders to Microsoft just endlessly throwing money at consumer markets and not getting any kind of return. Even the XBox, while it has been in the black on a quarterly basis for the last few quarters, still is years away from paying back the vast investment in capital and R&D that Redmond threw at it.

Tell that to the people of Fukushima, Chernobyl or Sellafield, or several other sites. In theory, it's cleaner, but those pesky humans keep messing up the "near perfect" statistics. I'm not saying wind or carbon is the solution, but Nuclear has proven to be a lot less safe and clean than the statistics promised so far.

Just a minute. I'll use VisualBasic to make a GUI.

Better than having it somewhere else...

You're technobabble sucks. You neglected to invoke neutrinos or tachyons.

Me, myself and I all met and agreed what we're doing is just fine.

The exact same arguments you are giving can also be used to advocate getting rid of VMs. Why construct an entire VM if you're only going to run one application on it? You can just as easily run it on the bare metal and put the redundancy and failover and all that on the application layer. You don't need an entire virtual machine to just run one application in a single security context. VMs are useful because they allow you to be flexible in where and how you run your applications and operating systems. If you get rigid and only allow a single security context to exist on a VM, you are taking away the flexibility and therefore it's usefulness. People want the extra clutter, since it's easier and thus cheaper to use it this way.

These days, you can't get more features out of your gamer card by tricking the card or driver software into believing it is a "Pro" card any more. If you buy a Pro card now, it's usually based on the previous generation of chipset, with a well stabilized and thoroughly tested driver, compared to the very short time to market that top range gamer cards get. The big problem is that newer chipsets often are run on the same driver and iterations between the chipsets are often nothing more than a die shrink size and maybe some optimization in memory path, controllers and such. This means that drivers are essentially the same for all chipsets and the single code base requires both stability for Pro cards and bleeding edge features for the latest and greatest gamer stuff. Essentially, the Pro users of GFX cards like the CUDA and engineering people, suffer from the big pull of the gamer market demanding ever increased high resolution and frame rates because the manufacturers work with a single code base for both lines of product.

Except of course it isn't, save in the minds of the ideologically deranged.

I'm not clear. How does this disprove climate change?

The guinea pig/sacrifical lamb in our organization who has been testing Windows 8 for the last four months still absolutely loathes it, and has requested she be returned to Windows 7. Her most frequent complaints surround the jarring context switch between the desktop and metro.