Dude, Chill. This is nothing more than the typical inflammatory anti-MS headline that's common on slashdot, but has little to do with reality. MS can't stop this game. It's for the PC, NOT the Xbox. This is just a case of MS covering their asses from a PR standpoint. It's not as if there is any other PC game that they license or condone to begin with.

As long as developers stick with the "I only put ads in the free version" mentality, that's fine. But, let's be honest, if a developer can get away with it, they'll put it in paid apps as well -- "well, it'd be MORE expensive if I didn't have the ad in there". There is precedent, you know. Several games over the years have put ads into the games (ie "billboards" on car racing games). It's subtle, but there. Then there's cable TV. They used to have fewer commercials then regular TV. Not anymore. Movie theaters now show ads before the movies start, despite the fact tickets continually go up in price. Hell, Dishnetwork started putting up ads at the bottom of my guide screen. I screamed bloody murder, and THEN they told me how to turn them off (you have to go about 3 screens deep in the setup menu). iAd makes ads easy, prettier, "less" intrusive. All justifications for a developer to stick them in, even if it's a paid app.

Microsoft basically owns the desktop market and the office productivity market. While there may not be a whole lot of growth left, it's a steady stream of revenue. Huge volume, low revenue per individual sale. Nice steady stock with low volatility and steady dividends. Apple's revenue is essentially entirely due to 2 or 3 products. Namely the iphone and the ipad. While wildly popular, neither completely dominates it's niche market -- and competition is growing every day. Apple has high revenue per sale, but "relatively" low volume. Fantastic growth due to a few wildly popular products. Lots of rapid growth. So, it depends on who do you think is a more viable company for teh long term. I think in the short term, Apple is a great company. Long term? I'm not so sure. MS obviously can recover from multiple major missteps (and has). I'm not sure if Apple can. To have so much of your revenue from so few products means that each iteration of those products has to be a slam dunk. Apple can't really afford any major mistakes with any of it's products. Also, a large part of Apple's success lies in it's marketing and Jobs' cult of personality. The quality of Apple's products can be argued, but, personally, I don't think that any one Apple product is significantly better than any other product on the market -- and in terms of actual product features, Apple lags (ie cut and paste, etc on iPhone). But, Apple is "perceived" to be better by the majority of customers, and Jobs is "perceived" to be a technological visionary. Jobs has been through some major illnesses. I think if something should happen to him, Apple's stock could take a dive. Damn. I can't get paragraphs to work right. Sorry.

Frankly, these days all the phones are pretty much getting to be the same. iPhone, Android, WinMo. There's very little you can do on one that you can't do on another. Don't get me wrong, it might be harder or less pretty on one OS or another, but it usually can be done. I can pretty much find any "kewl" app equivalent on WinMo that people gush about on Apple or Android. And vice versa. Heck, even the UI's and ecosystems are converging. Apple's implementing quasi multitasking, cut and paste, and folders. WM7 is decidedly Applish in flavor and ecosystem. Android is in the middle between current WinMo and iPhone. The one area that Apple has an advantage is that for some reason, everyone and their mother thinks that Apple dominates the Smartphone market... When it reality, it doesn't. RIM is still way out in front. Frankly, Apple's not really that far ahead of WinMo, and every media site HATES WinMo. Everybody just thinks everyone else has an iPhone so they want one too. It's essentially a self fulfilling prophecy. Where WinMo and Android have the advantage, however, is user customization and variety. You're not locked into Apples ecosystem and how they think you should use your phone. I think that's a fairly big deal which is why android's been taking off so quickly.