I've used iStopMotion -- and loved it. Only a customer, not connected with the company in any way.

The Google Code page for Webp makes grand claims that Webp is better than JPEG and JPEG2000 at compressing images, and then points to a study that compares the three methods by having each recompress an image that is already JPEG-compressed. Recompressing a previously-lossily-compressed image is a rather different task than compressed an original image.

It is unclear to me how quality was measured for all the graphs in the study -- was quality measured against the original image? I doubt that -- the images were harvested from Flickr, so the original (pre-JPEG-compression) aren't likely to be available. Instead, the quality was measured against the decompressed images, which have been blurred by the JPEG process.

If one wants to take one's collection of JPEG-compressed images and compress them further, without losing quality, one should decode the Huffman-encoded stream and re-encode using an arithmetic coder. One will save about 10% of the filesize without losing any quality at all. The Q coder is specified in the JPEG standard, so this can be done in a standards-compliant way, though no web browser supports that (which is a problem Webp also has).

I remember that interview: Bill Gates was asserting that people won't pay for bug fixes, but only for new bells and whistles. And he's right! People expect software with no bugs and they expect that the inevitable bugs will be fixed for free. The big problem, of course, is that Microsoft put new bells and whistles at a higher priority than bug fixes since they get paid for the former but do the latter for free.

I think for some subset of the geek worker population, ones who work in start-ups, the end of the job is when either the company folds or it is bought out.

Canada is actually a mash-up of Great Britain 2.1 and France 2.2.

Surely you meant Uwe Boll?

/me ducks

What, like this?

For software companies, not just Microsoft, there is almost no cost associated with manufacturing and distribution. The cost of developing the software, however, is real and is accrued before the software ships, hence it is accounted for as "Research and Development." Microsoft's "billions of dollars" of R&D is really Microsoft's labor costs -- the programmers who write the code. I suspect that actual real research is a small portion of that sum.