I think the latter is correct. It's all about ecosystems now, and MS failed at every attempt they've made to build one (except for xbox, but theyve utterly failed to expand that brand outside of consoles despite countless half-assed attempts). They probably figure that Nokia running WP was one of the last chances they'd have for getting into the devices ecosystems, which in the without which they lost all relevance.
But that they, and especially Nokia, think their best bet is for two bloated has-beens who've been unable to turn their titanics around and consistently failed at any attempts to reinvent themselves for 10+ years, is pretty moronic.
Dear MS/Nokia: "Let's just keep throwing money at it" is not a strategy.

It was just too late by 2011. They should've properly invested in Maemo(/Meego) when they initially released it in 2005. Had that been polished up and shoved into a sexy phone before Android (or even iPhone) took off, the landscape today would likely have been very very different.

Nokia WAS fucked mainly cause its managed by morons, and Android certainly isn't magic, so I'm with you there. But it's a little more nuanced than you depict. A Lumia with Android would not have been a magic bullet, but it would have been, and still would be, one of the top 5 sexiest android phones. It would be looking super sexy on that shelf right alongside the S4s and HTC One's, but with WP, it's in a corner of the shop that only lost children end up in. A few tangential points: 1) There's nothing particularly unique about Nokia's PHB problem. Almost every large company suffers with these issues. Nokia may have been particularly bad, but they still manage to make beautiful phones at competitive prices. 2) At the time they chose WP, Samsung was nowhere near the market leader it is now. HTC was a pretty big deal at the time while the best that Samsung had out there was the S2. The "only samsung is making it and everyone else is drowning" is bs. The top dog can fall off his perch in a single year. The S2 situation was barely two years ago and you can kind of pinpoint Samsung's "mindshare dominance" starting at the S3: only slightly over a year ago! If you look at Xiaomi, the HTC One, Moto X, etc, you start to see that the gap between top dog and the runner-ups is miniscule. 3) There STILL is no "Apple of the android market". I mean there is no Android manufacturer who has taken the route of making superbly beautiful phones with no compromises. Top dog Samsung's phones are nowhere near as beautiful or high quality as the Lumias or iPhones. The few phones where it looks like any effort was made in design tend to be pretty much clones (like HTC One = BBX).

What kind of moron would store their digital data in only one location? Of course that's not what I was suggesting. Store X amount of copies locally and X amount in online/remote places. Adjust X based on your level of concern. No single backup, no matter how reliable, is more reliable than multiple copies. It's not really about digital vs physical, but given that digital makes it so easy to make those multiple copies, it seems a no-brainer to me. Keep those physical CDs if you like for whatever reasons, but it's not the best way to preserve your music library for the rest of your life. Once it's digital, the data is abstracted from the storage medium and easily transferred and duplicated as much as you like, and you are no longer prey to any of the issues associated with all physical media (including hard drives): failure, obsolescence, theft, destruction, loss, etc.

Save youself the hassle and download from online "sources". I don't think it's even illegal in most places, if you own the CD.

Look up flac and then please explain why wav.

The thing is it's trivially easy to move/copy your data from one digital locker to another. Can't say the same about physical storage.

Mac Mini is $599 so, strike 1. Use itunes, strike 2 and 3. I'd sooner get apple tv and hack xbmc on it, for only 99. Still can't be used headless though, so problem not solved. Q not doing UPNP or any other way to access a NAS is a total showstopper, but I'll be amazed if someone doesn't hack it in real soon now. Waiting and seeing.

All those who think this is a crappy product, tell me what your hifi setup is? If you're a self-respecting nerd, you've got a home NAS of some kind where you have your gigs and gigs of music, on the network. And you certainly do not listen to music off your crappy computer speakers, nor do you use one of those crummy 2 dollar speaker-docking stations. You've got a proper hifi, right? If so, I don't get what you all have been using all these years that is such a great solution? Squeezebox and Sonos are very good, but with very limited customizability and other limitations. For example squeezebox doesnt do upnp and really expects you to use their slimserver to manage your music. That's all fine until you want to use some other devices as well. Then there's XBMC, which is a great HTPC but really cant be run headless, and the android remotes I've tried all suck. And frankly everything else out there is either not available in my area or has some severe crippling flaw. I want a device that: is 300, has digital out, does UPNP or CIFS/NFS, is customizable, can be easily controlled from a PC or smartphone, and allows me to easily sync my playlists preferably via non-proprietary standard formats. Bonus points for hdmi and supporting external music services. I realize the Q doesnt do all this out of the box (as far as I know), but given that it seems its going to be quite hackable, I'm optimistic it will. In short, for me the Nexus Q is what I've been waiting for for YEARS.

funny how god's retribution coincidentally occurs just as randomly as natural randomness. i guess it's a disguise tactic.

No. Having a final build leak a month before the release date is a total and utter sales catastrophe. No one who profits from the sale of the game would do it deliberately. The vast majority of a typical game's sales are in the first weeks after it's release. Even honest gamers who were dying for the game will have hard time a) avoiding the temptation to download it b) justifying buying it when it finally comes out when they've already beat it 5 times and moved on to waiting for the next AAA title. And THAT'S also why they continue to push for better DRM. It's not to PREVENT piracy and it appearing online, these guys aren't stupid. They all know it gets cracked and appears online within hours or days of release. But it's just to try and push it more towards "days" than "hours", because the sales they make in those few days makes the DRM all worth it. Many developers have written about this quite openly with numbers to back it up.

Maybe you're exaggerating just a wee bit there?

About 10+ years ago when MPEG-2 decoder cards and ADSL appeared, I thought finally, we are on the verge of having "content providers" who basically just host all the films and shows they can pile up and we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want, flexibly being able to choose whether it's ad-supported, a monthly subscription, or per viewing. I grossly underestimated old media and people's addiction to the boob tube. I don't watch any TV at all anymore. I don't even have a tuner of any sort. There's just too much other more interesting media out there nowadays to compete against the old "plop yourself on a lazyboy and watch whatever's on for hours and hours" patheticness. The once-a-week 25 minute show with 20 minutes of ads is just not something I will ever, ever, ever return to. I'd rather not watch at all. I download or buy all my films/shows and watch exactly what I want, when I want, and that's the only way for me, and it looks like this perspective is becoming more and more popular. Finally.

What we're seeing here is simply that RHEV, Hyper-V, etc are becoming 'good enough' for many many customers that have until now had no other choice than VMware. But really, on the ENTERPRISE level, VMware is The Leader. It's leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else. Live data migration for starters is a lovely killer feature. In terms of usability, especially in very large environments (1000s of VMs) there is NOT ONE feasible competitor with the management features VMware provides. RHEV is just about there, but for many enterprises it's a bit too new. Everything else is crap, frankly. And even many "enterprise" solutions like AIX LPARs and Solaris LDOMs, completely lack a proper management interface, making living with hundreds/thousands of VMs a very different affair compared to vSphere or RHEV-M.