The company I work for has a number of workstations close to that of the one represented in TFA, in the 5 digits. Instead of forcing such a radical change down everyone's throat, they went about it step by step, over several years, and it's still ongoing.

They started by gradually replacing several critical programs with web apps or frontends, killing off IE6 with "please use firefox" prompts for good measure. This part was met with only some token resistance by the users, mostly because of a couple of glitches that where promptly fixed. After the first couple of months, general opinion was that the change was very positive, especially because of how cumbersome and hard to use the old apps (some over 10-20 years old) where.

The next phase was replacing Office, and it came with a huge backlash. The chief complaints where not so much about OpenOffice funcionality (along with some "it's *UGLY*!"), but about compatibility with MS generated documents. As of yet, it has been impossible to take MSOffice away from the "higher-ups", as any single minor UI or functionality change is bitched about as if it was a sign of the Apocalypse. Coupled with the long standing tradition of "sending down" 2-slide ppts, it was a huge mess.
It's somewhat better now, as PDF has become the standard for operational documents, and xls or docs are glossed over to make sure nothing's horribly broken.

Some areas (notably, reporting and analysis of KPIs) still rely heavily on excel features. Work is being done on that front, not so much because of the OSS push, but mainly because of the nightmare levels of voodoo in macro and VBA scripting involved. One hears talk of chicken blood and other dark rituals several times a week, which is how frequently something breaks.

There's also a couple of critical windows-specific programs that haven't yet been replaced, but when that's done in another year or so, pretty much any OS is a viable pick. Though definitely not an easy change, it can be done in small steps and with minimal disruption. YMMV, mostly on how dependent you are on MsOffice...

"I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty." Whoever wrote that step up, I know you're in here.

What Sky is contesting isn't a trademark on "SkyDrive", but on "SkyWhateverYouPutHere", much like Apple argued over iWhatever. This is just ridiculous...

...will come as a RIAA lawsuit.

I long for the day a judge starts lumping patent infringement lawsuits together. It'd be the end of the current Patent Cold War, with the assured destruction of all the major players. They'd either move away from patenting altogether or die out, either way letting the rest of us free to work on building a better world...

Spam levels dropping, less identity fraud... It's all about censorship and connecting to twitter through smoke signals nowadays.

Give me back my internets!!

I got a +1 informative only because there's no "-1 failed to notice irony". :)

The difference to a Canon EOS 50D being that the flash on the Canon is stuck to the top?

I'm not that well versed in photography as to understand how much of an impact this can have, hence my original post. ;)

...manually aiming it? People have been doing it for decades with regular cameras...

As there's a case for the word actually being descriptive, referring to the compact, slick enclosure.

Electronic components in a housing have certainly been called "pod" before.

I don't think so. Jobs may be a risk taker, but I don't see him starting a war that will take who knows how long, for who knows what gain, at who knows what cost...

If you group those as a trend, then it's a very long trend, stretching all the way back to the '30s... In any case, no one can take ownership of an ordinary word. One of the conditions for registering a trademark is that it is distinctive (see trademark distinctiveness).

Regarding Scotch tape and Q-tip (and others, like band-aid), they were surely distinctive when originally created (ok, "scotch" is a dubious one), but have seen been widely adopted as a generic name for those products, and are likely subject to being challenged in court, just like aspirin was (aspirin is no longer a Bayer trademark, but instead a generic name for acetylsalicylic acid).

There's more to trademark than customer protection. When you invest heavily in promoting your brand, it's reasonable to expect protection against a competitor that wants to take advantage of your advertising by putting out a similarly named product. Even if someone rolled out a music player named "aPod", I have serious doubts anyone would genuinely mistake it for an iPod, but that doesn't mean the name should be allowed.

That being said, I share the opinion that Apple is going way too far with this lawsuit.Everyday they remind me more and more of Microsoft. Actually, as alike as two peas in a ***.