I will never, ever, forgive them for their short-sightedness in shutting down Reader. We told them at the time that they were shutting down a massive community of geeks & influencers, but they went ahead and did it anyway. A massive strategic mistake.

Maybe I was naive, but I never really thought about the prospect of Google shutting down a service I relied on - sure they shut down some services that had almost zero usage, but a server *I* relied on? No, Google would never do that. It's used by geeks and technologists for goodness sake, Google was *our* company.

Then the hammer fell - Reader was a service I accessed every half hour of every day. I know we some good alternatives have belatedly emerged (well, one), but the problem remained - how could I ever recommend a Google service to anyone in the future? How could I recommend gmail to my family when I wasn't sure it would vanish overnight because Google believes we were doing email wrong? How could I recommend to my boss that we move some critical infrastructure to App Engine, when Google had shown it was willing to shut down heavily used services because they just weren't quite big enough? Maybe all the snarly comments about fancy food and foosball tables were right all along - Google was staffed with kids and academics who had no idea how the real world worked.

Absolutely true. Companies these days are like 9th century coastal villages in Europe. Snakeoil vendors are selling magic potions and amulets to the village inhabitants promising to ward off evil. These villages may have some security people. These security people might be diligent and hard working, but when a horde of vikings appear on the horizon there is little or nothing they can do.

We need to withdraw to fortified castles and towns. Centralise our security resources and, instead of making holes all over the corporate networks, ensure that there is only one way in and out. Monitor everything going in and out of the corporate network through a single chokepoint. If you want to set up your business outside the fortified walls, you take your chances. It won't stop all attackers, but it will stop most.

There simply isn't enough good security people, and those that are out there are scattered working with multiple companies - the attackers have all the advantages at the moment and it is only getting worse.

They should have waited till they had more of their customer base tied into Office 365, and then raised prices. As it is, many companies I know are wavering between going with an all Microsoft future (along with 365), or going with a mixed Linux/MS environment. This will make that decision easier.

You can walk around today with a video camera in your hand pointing at people. There's nothing stopping you. Try it and let us know how you get on.

You'd be some idiot to build a business on the back of a service that might disappear. At least with the IaaS providers you have some hope of being able to recover should the service provider decide they no longer want to support their service, because you can shift your application to new infrastructure. If you're tied into the Google world-view, you're only a short blogpost away from seeing your business threatened.

This. This is the biggest thing for me. It's not like this was a niche product, Google had built _the_ best RSS reader and it in turn had become the core infrastructure for many products and services. I use Reader on the web, I use it on my Mac, I use it on my phone. I'm not naive, but I guess I expected that only super-niche products would ever be shut down by Google. I'm disgusted, this will make me much more wary of using any Internet service in the future, particularly one from Google.

Ubuntu might write off people who oppose this change as a small minority of geeks, and the vast majority of people won't care.

Which is true in the short term. Unfortunately as history has proved repeatedly, the "vast majority of people" go to a geek for advice. That might be a family member, a trusted friend or some geek writing something online. They might not understand what the issue is, but over time they will hear the geek background noise about what Ubuntu is doing. In the Medium to Long term, Ubuntu is in trouble if they continue down this track.

MS have just completely screwed over Nokia. Very few people are going to buy a new Nokia now until WP8 appears, so Nokia have no business for the next 6 months. I'm not sure they can survive that long with no income.

I agree. They appear to be betting the company on Windows 8 in an attempt to capture the market for touch enabled devices, and are willing to risk alienating millions of their customers as a consequence. Why they wouldn't follow through on that strategy by all but giving away the RT licenses is beyond me. Windows 8 makes it clear that they are not willing to settle on becoming merely niche players in this market, whereas high pricing on licenses seems to indicate the reverse.

Perhaps we have two parts of the company engaging in competing strategies, in which case responsibility for the mess would fall very squarely on Ballmer and senior management who should be setting the overall company strategy.

+1 this. I'm sick of distributions which I've gotten used to and liked who suddenly throw themselves (and my productivity) off a GUI cliff. I don't care if you're putting in place the building blocks for some super duper new GUI, I use my computers to get things done and don't like having a "WTF?" moment when I upgrade.

I used and really liked KDE for a long time, and along came 4.x . Suddenly I was left with a half working GUI, and was told that "well you shouldn't have upgraded should you?" and "it'll get better when we fix all the bugs". This is my problem now is it?

MS are about to run into the same issue with Windows 8. Taking a well known and, maybe not loved but tolerated, GUI paradigm of a desktop and discarding it. It's going to cause chaos and resentment amongst their user community, many of whom will look at alternatives.

I greatly respect everyone who contributes to open source, and I know you put your heart and soul into it, but for most of us our computers are not toys that we sit and tinker with endlessly to display snazzy new GUI effects, they are the tools we use to get things done. Once you lose the trust of the user that they can rely on you to provide a stable and easy to use OS you will have an incredibly hard job getting them back.

You've never heard of Myles na gCopaleen/Flann O'Brien? Seriously? Ask some of your friends have they heard of him, I guarantee most will.

In fairness I think even a few bishops administered a sharp belt of the crozier to the dopy religious eejits who were proclaiming it was a miracle.

This happened the last time we had a recession, I'm surprised it hasn't started happening again. We love a good recession us Catholics we do, it's a truly miserable time and all the better for it.

Next thing "science" will probably try and explain moving statues.

Why would I go to another site, when the greatest source I've ever found for an exchange of real world technical opinions on enterprise IT is found right here? I might as well be reading one of the industry magazines if I wanted PR blurb.

I officially declare Internet Bubble 2 as confirmed!