you guys are reading into it too much. it's water, thats bottled. you drink it, and you get less dehydrated. do you really need approval to say that? how about we not overlook common sense on this one?

It's all about the $$$. Because the mobile market is a newer market and has the room for growth, companies and individuals are grabbing market share every way they can, and they're getting $$$. The big companies too are investing more $$$ to make more $$$. What drives growth faster than the $$$?

i don't fully agree with the fuel tank analogy. i'd say it'd be more like removing the A/C, but then again it said somewhere the feature isn't used by the majority of people. a better analogy would be like removing a seat warming feature, or disabling gps navigation. enough impact to make a fuss and ruin PR but not enough to trash all your Sony goods over.

On a separate note also take into consideration that Chinese culture is very different than the culture here in the U.S., where most elderly require a nursing home or a caretaker. In China, its more common to see households with multiple generations under one roof. The families end up absorbing a lot of the costs associated with caring for the elderly, by doing it themselves.

The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is fictitious. It is really an overestimate of the sales on the proprietary software vendor's part.

I'd go even further than that, and suggest that open source doesn't necessarily take away from software vendors, but allows more users access to software that they normally wouldn't pay for. When I see software labeled 'Free Trial' next to one labeled 'Free', I almost always go with the latter. But then again maybe I'm just cheap.