Phones "only a few hundred dollars - less in America". Yeah, good luck with that. New smart phones are $199, sure, but I pay $250 a month for three data plans and three phones and I get a hefty employee discount. When I was young, I would have NEVER prioritized a phone, at current expense, over other things. Phone plans are like a car payment, but it never ends as long as you are using a phone. It's no wonder young people don't have cable, or sometimes, cars.

Reasons to never visit a chain theater again. They are worse than chain restaurants. If you can, go to a local "movie and brews" type place. Alamo Draft House, for example here in Austin. No lines - you buy online, you print your ticket, you reserve your seat, they bring food to you. Bonus: they ban texting and talking and don't let people in after the movie starts. THAT'S how to run a theater. Not 3 gallon buckets of popcorn for $10, not gimmicky Movie premieres. Good food, good beer, good service, and no moronic customers allowed.

Maybe you could site a modern first generation car...something maybe in the 21st century? I think you might find that new car quality is at a high-point.

Like Sears, MS exploited an unique market position to enter many other markets.

This comparison is very accurate. If you spend much time on eBay or Craigslist, you're sure to see vintage products branded as Sears or Montgomery Wards. Crazy stuff that sometimes makes you scratch your head wondering why they ever thought it would be a lucrative product segment that they'd make any kind of money offering an in-house brand.

I once found an old snowmobile suit in a thrift store with a Montgomery Wards label. At the time, I wondered how many snowmobile suits were ever sold that Montgomery Wards felt they needed to get into the market. I guess they were playing hardball with the manufacturers at the time and cut a deal with one vendor to make MW-labelled suits and that positioned them to tell dictate pricing to the other venders lest they not be carried alongside the MW snomobile suits.

My wife was a non-traditional student recently. We bought an iPad because one term of books cost more than the iPad. Nobody told us the e-books were gonna be just as expensive as the physical books, and they expired to boot. Not the iPad's fault, but iPad-as-cost-savings is a pretty short sighted strategy.

She did like not having to carry 25 lbs. of books around in 100+ temps though.

Exactly this. Microsoft just keeps piling on layers of code to existing legacy code in fear of losing that Microsoft Word 4.0 user, at the expense of everyone else.

Blasphemy! Microsoft has made lots of really cool things, like Songsmith!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E

I have a simpler analysis of the decision makers at Microsoft. They never consider "just make good stuff that people want to buy" as a plausible business model.

If you don't think iOS is stealing from Microsoft's (and Apple's) OS market, you are delusional.

This comment makes me sad for humanity. Also, if this were true, why do they serve 3 gallon servings of soda? That just makes bigger asses, allowing for fewer asses per screening.

And here I was being all pragmatic and equating "flop" with "bad movie". Lest I forget, I live in the land of the stupid where the only thing that matters is making money.

Again, missing the point. People don't "need" outlook. They think they do, they buy an iPad, configure the mail tool to their exchange server, then forget they ever needed outlook in the first place. There's no point in arguing because if people really wanted to do Office stuff on their tablet devices, they wouldn't be buying millions of iPads. But they are, because they don't want to, which is the point Microsoft is missing.

This is one of the most astute comments I have read about Ballmer's departure all day.

Continuing in this direction, I wonder if the timeliness of his announcement was based on the need to begin production of Surface 2.0. Board of directors wasn't willing to throw good $billions after bad. They got rid of the guy who was signing the checks for more Surface investment and are about to follow HP's example and bring in a CEO that will shut down tablet development and the mobile OS.

By no means am I agreeing with HP pulling plug on WebOS, but I do think Microsoft might be gearing up for more staggering losses than HP suffered if they continue with these products (Surface & WindowsRT). I expect to see WindowsRT open-sourced and tossed on the side of the road within weeks.

These ads only further the notion that MS doesn't get it. Only geeks care about sd cards and number of USB ports. People don't care about buzzwords like "multitasking". People don't buy iPads to create PowerPoint slides. People DO play chopsticks on their iPad. It really isn't that difficult. Keep your head in the past then wonder why nobody is buying your products...

But Microsoft has a long history of doing this. I think the business tactic of "wait for Apple, then do that" has grown long in the tooth for the MS faithful, and they are really bad at copying otherwise good technologies.

The other problem MS has is they have low standards...they don't get what makes teh shiny desirable. Their version of teh shiny is zune brown and WinXP Fisher Price interfaces. "Close Enough" should be their corporate byline.