Slashdot Mirror

http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-pulls-its-horrible-puppy-abuse-ad-2012-11?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+(Silicon+Alley+Insider)

http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-the-day-how-north-korea-could-destroy-seoul-in-two-hours-2010-5?op=1

A bit old, but it was the first result in my Google search.

That said, go look yourself.

Hi. Even if you don't understand their reasons, the fact is a LOT of people are buying mobile devices. More than the number of PCs in the USA in 2012. These guys even expect that the current trend will lead to the number of PCs being much smaller than the number of mobile devices. One of the slides I linked to there even says that these new consumers add up to a $10Bn market, growing at 100% per year. So yes, you'll prefer your more conventional PC to work, which is fine, but if companies overlook the mobile/tablet user, they'll risk missing out on a lot of $$$. In these circumstances, do you really think that you will call yourself and PC users as "the real users" for a lot longer?

Ok, can we just stop paying attention to traditional media until it all dies? I don't think I've read an article in the last year that wasn't trying to provoke outrage, fear or hatred through selective reporting, manipulation of data, and gross simplification.

Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft.

What, so now it's impossible to start your own website? To run your own services? That's news to me. Just because there are now large, popular sites doesn't mean small, unpopular sites are now non-existent. The internet that we had 30 years ago is still there, it's just nobody uses it. But it's not like, say, the presence of Facebook means IIRC has suddenly been uninvented.

No, it's not impossible to start up your own website or service. That's easy. Easier now than it's ever been, actually. The hard part is getting eyeballs to visit/use whatever you're putting out there so you're not just talking with yourself. With around 640 million websites to choose from, nobody is going to know about or care about whatever you're putting out there without a tremendous stroke of luck.

This is the patent that won Apple their billion dollar verdict against Samsung.

That's weird, I remember the jury verdict citing six patents. Pinch to zoom was one of them but surely it was only a fraction of the full billion?

Remember when Slashdot was just news and not someone trying to insert a questionable-at-best opinion into a story?

... no. :/

This is the patent that won Apple their billion dollar verdict against Samsung.

That's weird, I remember the jury verdict citing six patents. Pinch to zoom was one of them but surely it was only a fraction of the full billion?

Remember when Slashdot was just news and not someone trying to insert a questionable-at-best opinion into a story?

This is the patent that won Apple their billion dollar verdict against Samsung.

That's weird, I remember the jury verdict citing six patents. Pinch to zoom was one of them but surely it was only a fraction of the full billion?

It is $200+. Apple's all time high is $705, and Monday it was trading pre-market below $500.

It is not cherry picking data. It is pointing out that the dance is winding down. It was a great ride while it lasted. I've seen this things before. Trees don't grow to the sky.

As this article points out Apple is merely a niche player now.

http://www.businessinsider.com/android-market-share-2012-11

Apple is 6th in China, the fastest growing market:

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/iphone-5-hits-china-as-apple-market-share-slips/310515-11.html

Apple is a company that has gone about as far as they are going to go unless they find new markets and new products. And finding something on the scale of the iPhone is going to be really unlikely. As one of the articles I pointed out, that's a once and a lifetime event.

According to this article the TSA spent 80 million dollars on scanners. According to This article they're spending 245 million dollars more to test them. According to this article a human life is worth 7.4 million dollars. We've spend an extra 40 billion dollars since 9/11 on airport security. That means we need to have saved 34 lives by body scanner alone or 5405 lives by all airport security.

It doesn't add up.

I don't find it sad, other than it's sad that some public companies are run by people who don't understand their responsibilities to the public.

We have financial disclosure laws and public-release laws because of situations like this: http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-insider-trading-scandals-2011-11?op=1

I think there is a good reason why you referenced our grandfathers rather than our fathers. Even then your claim is dubious. My grandfather, on "just" a bachelor's degree, single-handedly supported a family, owned a home in Long Beach and a vacation cabin and a boat, and retired on an inflation-adjusted pension after only 25 years of work at a company, from which he drew for 25 years. He even owned real furniture, not this particle-board and plastic crap of today. Granted, he didn't have slashdot.

Apple doesn't make an Air with a detachable monitor that becomes a tablet, and that's what you want.

But I thought Lord Jobs always said no one would want a touchscreen laptop?

As all my apps are free, that's not a concern for me. I financially benefit from Google's (far) cheaper rates.

One of the points you raised was why. I provided a valid reason: the App store generates more revenue than Google Play. That said, I'm glad to hear that you make your applications available free of charge. There is a market for pay apps, and if that's the route you're going Apple seems to be an arguably better bet. A successful developer understands requirements. Depending on what hardware the majority of your target market uses, if a significant number of them use Apple, it may make sense to target them - just as you're doing with your App with respect to Android and Google Play. Not every business can afford to ignore 15%+ of a market (especially true with respect to Browser market share). In America a significant number of iDevices exist, and to ignore that market segment is a mistake.

For example, the company I work at develops apps (targeting both platforms) for the health care industry and over 3/4 of our clients' audience use iPhones. The apps are given away by our clients, too. My medical insurance company does something similar and I'm able to look at blood work (among other things), usually the same day, on my phone. They released the iPhone version about 6 months ahead of the Android, here is an interesting article about why iOS is initially targeted instead of Android.

A good developer's time is worth more than $99/hour

Uh... what? Where?

According to this even the some of the highest paying positions with a good tech company aren't liable to net you much more than $100k or so per year, which works out to about $50 an hour.

Yeah, a paid developer should be able to afford $99/year without a problem... but saying that they can make that in an hour is nothing but an outright exaggeration.

Don't forget phosphate rock.

Despite all the (legitimate) complaints about disinformation and scientific illiteracy in the U.S., there's this.

As a counterpoint to the one I made, you show me a ratio of what forms of taxes people pay separated by state?

I got an idea; hop on your buggy whip and ride it to this page:

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5033e47e6bb3f7ab5a000004-900/the-top-10-pay-about-70-of-the-income-taxes.jpg

Or this one:

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5033e3e3ecad049417000002-900/here-are-the-income-taxes-paid-by-the-respective-income-percentiles-note-how-little-the-bottom-half-pay-blue-note-how-much-more-as-a-percentage-of-the-whole-the-top-5-are-paying.jpg

Honestly, how is it that the top 1% pay 30% of all taxes, yet the socialists decry that they aren't paying their fair share? Yeah, they're not paying they're fair share, they're paying 30 times their fair share! But we're the 99% right? That means we should only have to pay 1%, amirite?

Funny things you can do with numbers by the way. Did you know that if you have more than $47,000 in income per year, you are in the top 1% of global income earners? It's true.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

How come you're entitled to the earnings of the top 1%, but the rest of the world isn't entitled to your earnings?

As a counterpoint to the one I made, you show me a ratio of what forms of taxes people pay separated by state?

I got an idea; hop on your buggy whip and ride it to this page:

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5033e47e6bb3f7ab5a000004-900/the-top-10-pay-about-70-of-the-income-taxes.jpg

Or this one:

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5033e3e3ecad049417000002-900/here-are-the-income-taxes-paid-by-the-respective-income-percentiles-note-how-little-the-bottom-half-pay-blue-note-how-much-more-as-a-percentage-of-the-whole-the-top-5-are-paying.jpg

Honestly, how is it that the top 1% pay 30% of all taxes, yet the socialists decry that they aren't paying their fair share? Yeah, they're not paying they're fair share, they're paying 30 times their fair share! But we're the 99% right? That means we should only have to pay 1%, amirite?

Funny things you can do with numbers by the way. Did you know that if you have more than $47,000 in income per year, you are in the top 1% of global income earners? It's true.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

How come you're entitled to the earnings of the top 1%, but the rest of the world isn't entitled to your earnings?

These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6

Why do you persist in asking stupid questions that are answered in the affirmative with five seconds of Google work?

I went to Google, typed in iphone 5 jailbreak, and got pages like "genuine progress being made". And I went to Google and typed in ipad jailbreak legality and got this page distinguishing tablets, which don't have a DMCA exemption, from phones, which do. What keywords did you end up typing?

They don't need to lobby because Apple zealotry is unfortunately strong enough as it is.

IT is not being picked on, in particular.
    Only the rich are getting richer.

Click that link to see
1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high.
2) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.

And we will.

I remember reading about a TV show with Dean Stockwell that predicted 911 and was predicting a massive reduction in world population.

Now I know how it will happen:
http://www.businessinsider.com/peak-phosphorus-and-food-production-2012-12

This, add Monsanto and laws against keeping seeds and voila: Starvation.

Big companies care about profits, not controlling you (as much as your conspiratorial mind might like you to believe). You say that Napster helped music companies. Oh really? Napster was released midway through 1999, so most people didn't have Napster in 1999, but it was building momentum. Do you know the peak year for music sales? Well, it was going up through the 1990s, and peaked in 1999. It's been a steady downhill ever since. The average consumer in 2009 in the US spent 30% as much money buying music as they did in 1999. It's a bloodbath in the music industry. If piracy helped the music industries, we'd be seeing record-breaking sales numbers, not the lowest sales numbers in 50 years.
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg

I disagree. According to Walmart here, the average Walmart associate makes $11.75 an hour.

If 4 such associates were to pool their resources, they would collectively make $94,000 a year. More than enough to allow 4 people to live a very comfortable lifestyle. Or even 9 people to live a somewhat comfortable lifestyle (assuming 4 adult workers, 1 adult child care, 4 children).

Of course this isn't the "American Dream" of 2.1 children, a white picket fence, dog in the yard, 2 cars, a home entertainment system, cable, internet, smartphones, Disney vacation per year, Starbucks latte every day, Prada purse, etc. etc. etc....but it's certainly livable.

-

Actually Elop sold his shares and Ballmer doesn't even seem to be in the top 5 individual owners. Only 10% of the stock is owned by insiders, the rest being owned by institutional investors. So it seems that either Microsoft is defrauding everyone including the largest institutional investors in the US, or the Licenses Sold metric is a valid way to measure the pace of sales.

Of course, Microsoft has their own spin on the numbers, but if you take the Vista "Licenses Sold" statistics and put them into context with similar statistics reported by Microsoft for other OSes, you can tell the Vista numbers reported at the time were too low to indicate the OS was growing at an acceptable rate. For instance, consider the following chart, which shows reported sales data from Microsoft for W95 - W7, and projections for W8, based on historical trends. You can easily tell that even with all the double counting, Vista sales are far below what you would expect for an OS that is selling well, such as XP or W7. To me, this says the effect of the double counting from upgrades is negligible compared to the sheer volume of regular license sales that make it to end users.

To check the reasonableness of this, take a look at this data in the chart for W7 sales, compared to actual growth reported by market share trackers like statcounter. The linked chart shows relatively linear (R^2 = .99) monotonic growth of Windows 7 after launch, implying a constant per month rate of sales. The Windows 7 "Licenses Sold" data from Microsoft in my chart shows Windows 7 sold on average 20.10 +- 2.2 Million units per month over the course of 36 months.

So to check to see how the "licenses sold" number reflects real adoption of the OS, we could probably look at the ratio of the rates of sales for Vista and W7 in both units sold and marketshare gain. We would expect, that if licenses sold translates to marketshare gain, then these ratios should be the same.

From the statcounter figures, in the period where Vista was on sale but before W7 was released, it gains marketshare at about .61 percentage points per month. Windows 7, after its release, gained market share at about 1.4 percentage points per month, for a ratio of 2.3. The same ratio for average "Licenses Sold" data is 20.01M/9.54M over the same period (12/2008 - 09/2009 for Vista, 12/2009 - 10/2012 for W7), for a ratio of 2.1. That means that either Microsoft understated Windws 7 Licenses Sold by 6.05%, or the overstated Windows Vista licenses by 5.71%, or some combination thereof.... and factor in Piracy which would not count as license sold.

Anyway, the point is that from past data released by Microsoft for "Licenses Sold" and actual data representing actual OS market share growth, the Licenses Sold metric is very nearly identical to and indicative of growth of the OS.

Graph
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/50b62f7769bedd754700000a-522-476/student-tuition-earnings.jpg

Full article
http://www.businessinsider.com/growth-in-college-tuition-vs-growth-in-earnings-for-college-graduates-2012-11

Graph
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/50b62f7769bedd754700000a-522-476/student-tuition-earnings.jpg

Full article
http://www.businessinsider.com/growth-in-college-tuition-vs-growth-in-earnings-for-college-graduates-2012-11

...as a progressive, meritocratic business environment hasn't been squashed yet?

Not only is it even more ageist than the rest of the IT industry in general, but it's also racist as all hell.

Apparently nobody notices if you cover it up with some hipster glasses and trendy office design, good thing this wasn't discovered earlier.

Re KGB visions:
COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) is the well known one. e.g..
So you http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-masato-aokis-history-with-the-black-panthers-2012-8
In the 1990's you had Code-named PATCON, "Patriot-conspiracy," http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/18/patriot_games
A lot of created groups controlled top down.
From the UK you have long-term sexual relationships with political activists.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/nov/21/met-police-spies-women-undercover
Antiwar groups in the USA seem to face the same old party tricks of facial recognition, OCR of any plates of parked cars near a meeting, the young 20 something who wants direct action, the older louder person with 'experience' who wants direct action... or the young woman who knows someone who has great ideas about direct action...
As for cyber groups - recall http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0306/Anonymous-unmasked-hacker-ringleader-turned-FBI-informant - seems to be the same old turn, top down control, wait, raid ideas.

We should let congress drive over the fiscal cliff so that democrats take the blame for thier inability to see that the Bush tax cuts don't even come close to paying for the deficit, current or projected.

How about instead of killing the economy with the uncertanty of this on again - off again tax cut, why don't we simplify the tax code completey and permanently.

Seeing as how people use deficit and debt interchangeably, I'm not sure what you're referring to.

The deficit is the year to year shortfall in the budget. The debt is the volume of outstanding loans. The former is a problem to be dealt with at the moment, the latter needs to be managed but does not have to magically be paid off over some fixed timeframe.

The world, currently - and for the foreseeable future - loves US debt, and can't buy enough of it. It's buying it so voraciously that at various points over the past few years, US treasury notes have had negative yields. People were literally paying the US for the privilege of loaning it money, because on the macro-scale, the US is a stable place to invest and you ultimately have to invest somewhere. The US, for the foreseeable future, will be able to refinance it's debt in perpetuity - the current situation is that doing nothing, would whittle the debt down to nothing even faster then inflation because of the aformentioned periods of "being paid to be loaned money" situation.

Now why is all that important? Because it effects how you view deficits, and their causes. Deficits go on the debt pile, and the debt pile is only a worry if it grows at an average rate that's higher then US GDP growth (or specifically: US tax revenue growth from GDP). The US never has to repay the debt. It simply takes out new debt - possibly at lower interest rates - to refinance it. You can do this indefinitely if you're an immortal country, and GDP growth and inflation whittle the debt away without needing to do anything. The debt pile can keep growing, but provided your GDP keeps pace, it'll never affect your ability to fund your year-to-year budget. Of course, a well-managed country also chooses to strategically reduce it's debt to keep it manageable when - like now - the deficit has to rise due to poor economic conditions, or if it wants to stabilize it's budgeting further against global conditions.

Which is where this graph comes in. The US deficit, is being driven principally by the Bush tax cuts, by the bailouts necessary due to the GFC, the wars, with the rest made up of the usual increased spend a downturn brings in welfare (people out of work = more welfare payouts). The US is not terminally in deficit, it's not being sunk by the welfare system, it's being sunk by idiotic fiscal policy (and probably a fair amount of graft and corruption between government contracts to big business backers like Halliburton).

If you really want to see terminal damage to the economy, watch what happens if you dismantle social welfare further. Convert the joblessness due to the downturn into permanent unemployment and then homelessness, and take a huge chunk of the productive workforce out of the workpool forever and into your policing and hospital emergency room spending instead - because they won't just disappear.

Or attacked the USA knowingly http://www.businessinsider.com/45-years-ago-this-week-israel-attacked-a-us-navy-ship-and-killed-dozens-of-sailors--survivors-want-to-know-why-2012-6

Ever notice people say 'recovery isn't fast enough' but never compare it to anything else? You can't say fast enough without some measure to make the judgement.
However, if you look at other countries, and US's history of recovery, the current recovery is pretty much the fastest ever.

Pretty much fastest ever? Not quite, see link below. Recovery is very slow by comparison to other recoveries.

http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-economic-recovery-2012-8?op=1

Bill Veghte was the head of Microsoft's Windows marketing and business development through Vista and leading to the Windows 7 launch. A 19 year Microsoft veteran. He went from there to HP in 2010, first to lead up the software division including Autonomy. In January of this year he became HP's Chief Strategy Officer, and in May he rocketed up to his current position. He is currently HP's Chief Operating Officer responsible for HP's day-to-day operations and being groomed for CEO, which was tipped to be an insider next time.

Now with Windows 8 launch at a critical phase Microsoft needs their man at the top of HP to keep it from falling off the Windows wagon when everybody else is getting drunk on mobile profit dollars that Microsoft platforms don't get a swig of.

That she will step down is obvious. She just wrote down 8.8 billion dollars in a stroke on a deal she voted as Chairman and CEO to approve. Monday that was 1/4th of HP's market cap, and as I write this it's over a third. HP has to sell about 300 million laptops to earn that sort of operating profit - which would take a decade. It's over a year's entire payroll. And that's not all. If you look at their balance sheet they have written off 20 billion dollars in goodwill in the last year - or as I write this, 87% of their current market capitalization - in one year. Those writedowns are effectively saying "oops. We overpaid for acquisitions." In this competitive environment a company the size of HP doesn't have the luxury of throwing away $20B overpaying for acquisitions. This is not poor judgement. It is quite clearly deliberately stripping a legendary company's assets to be the profits of external entities. It is a capital siphon. Somebody should be going to prison.

Really, who would pay over 11 billion dollars for a software company? That's 10,000 man years of American software engineer salary, or 50,000 man years of global mix software engineers. You could put a man on Mars for that much money. Software is hard, but it's not that hard. That is over 200 times what Google paid for Android, which last quarter was the world's most popular operating environment by devices shipped.

Sure, you can't blame her for too many of the other $11B, but really it doesn't matter at this point. If you're the boss everything that goes wrong is your fault. Else why even have a boss?

And yes, I did predict these things here - that he would be in position to be made CEO around the time of Windows 8 launch, that Autonomy would be written down. But I didn't put the two things together because there was no telling when they would do the writedown. If not for the writedown it would have to be another board scandal or something. Bill Veghte is HP's Elop. He will drive HP with a focus on optimizing the benefit to Microsoft until HP is no more. And for some reason he will be impossible for shareholders to remove until it is too late.

We still don't know where Sinofsky is going. He'll probably guru out in India for a while before he surfaces at the head of another tech company. And when he does, it's doomed.

Bob Mansfield, Apple's Indispensable Man, Gets New Responsibilities

How can Apple's stock tank? They are the only players in the smartphone and tablet market for the most part. In fact, all they have to do is introduce a new device and they just created a new ecosystem. Stock goes low, out comes a phablet.

That's weird, I'm almost certain that I heard about a competitor to Apple in the mobile device space:

http://www.businessinsider.com/mobile-market-share-2012-11

In the US, Apple's market share is stronger. According to Comscore, Android had 53% of the market in September, as compared to Apple's 34%.

In the short term, Apple has nothing to fear, they have plenty of money in the bank, but they need to keep coming out with innovative, game changing devices - incremental updates of their existing product line isn't going to fend off the competition. And they need to avoid more Apple Maps type blunders - don't ship a product until it's done.

It dips again, they make a server grade appliance similar to the XServe except with an iOS version running server apps

I don't know what the purpose of such an "enterprise grade IOS appliance" would be, but I think it's unlikely that Apple would try a push into the crowded Enterprise server market again.

...The TSA?
http://us.gizmodo.com/5947330/yep-the-tsa-is-definitely-stealing-ipads
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/convicted-tsa-officer-reveals-secrets-thefts-airports/story?id=17339513#.UKXz-hLJCPc
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505124_162-57523230/beware-your-gadgets-at-risk-of-theft-from-tsa/
http://www.businessinsider.com/tsa-agents-steal-from-passengers-2012-10
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/10/06/tsa-agent-accused-of-stealing-100-from-passengers-wallet/
Yeah, I know some of you are wondering WTF all the links, and "does he have a grudge" and so on. Well, suffice it to say my encounter with the scoundrels was double plus ungood.

Just goes to show, the only way the Nazi's could have been more evil was if they had patented their wartime tech.

If the Nazis had published patents, it would have been farcical, because the Allies would have just used them as a recipe book.

(You know we would have.)

Apple's profits have been dropping like a stone? What planet do you live on?

http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/500dafd46bb3f71002000002-960/chart-of-the-day-apples-real-earnings-expectations-july-2012.jpg

IMO, its a risky move by Google.

Since Microsoft is already hitting Google with everything they've got, there's no point in Google not fighting with all they've got too. For goodness sake, Microsoft is burning half a billion dollars a quarter on their online services division - almost entirely products designed to try to spoil the party for Google. The level of fail is laughable, but the attempt is there. Two billion dollars a year is a pretty significant corporate investment in sinking the other guy. And then there's collusion with Apple and Nokia. And then there are all the lawsuits against both Google and their Android partners, attempts to get products blocked in every court in the world, inside jobs in government to get Google's products blocked from adoption by governments, malicious advertising, and on and on and on.

"It's a risky move by Google" is only relevant if Microsoft isn't already doing all they can. That's a threatening thing to say, like "or Microsoft will respond negatively." Since Microsoft is already doing their worst, there is no additional risk at all.

This is precisely a bait and switch. You promise a free service, refuse to offer the free service and then demand money for the exact same functionality that was promised for free.

Combine this with recent accusations that Facebook's feeds have been broken on purpose as of late to necessitate promoting posts, and accusations of click-fraud eating up paid advertising and you have to wonder if Facebook is beginning to shoot themselves in the foot. They have tons of users, but they don't seem to know how to monetize that well.

http://memeburn.com/2012/11/is-facebook-really-broken-on-purpose/

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-accused-of-click-fraud-by-advertiser-2012-7

If business won't spend the money and there's a risk of it losing value, they can hand it back to the shareholders.

and if they invest and win, which they judge unlikely at this point already,

If business has no faith in it's ability to take risks and win, after handing the shareholders their money, they can turn off the lights and close the doors. The shareholders can find some other opportunity for investment.

have politicians pluck down a much larger chunk of the profits,

The claim that lower tax rates lead to higher growth has been debunked. At any rate, we tried it that way. It isn't working. Time to try something different.

All it would take is Google or one other company with adequately deep pockets to actually take this guy to court and that would be the last we'd hear of Mr. Spangenberg or his trollish little company.

From the summary:

And while most of those lawsuits are ongoing, many companies have already settled with TQP rather than take the case to trial, including Apple

A company with deep pockets? $100 billion dollars isn't "adequately" deep enough?

I don't know anything about this patent but if there was a company that thought they'd have the money to shut these guys up, it'd be the elephant in the universe with so much money they have a dividend and share repurchase program.

Hows austerity working for England, or Europe in general?

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-us-vs-uk-growth-2012-4

The author of the linked story at Business Insider sounds quasi-tech and was a volunteer for the phone calls. He received an email late Monday night with a 60 page PDF of instructions and lists of names to call, and complained that he had to print it at home. Who prints PDF's when they can just view the document on their PC and make the calls, especially on a home inkjet printer?

It sounds like not only was the development of this tool a disaster but so was implementation at the user end point. If this tech-savvy guy tried to print at home with limited success just imagine what the "regular" Romney supporters were doing (or not doing) when they got the 60 page PDF.

They don't have any particular duty. Read Zuckerberg's IPO letter. He made it clear that shareholders profit was not fb's top priority but I think he gave strategic reasons for that.

So Microsoft releases the first stable version of Windows 7 on February 22 of 2011 and a year later you're calling a 1/3 drop in Windows sales "frightening"? Perhaps they were just coming down from everyone's move to Windows 7? I mean you (hopefully) only need to buy that once for your machine.

When revenue in just about all divisions drop to near 2006 levels, you've got a problem.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-income-by-segment-2012-10

Uh, we're also at the same levels were were in March of 2010 and March of 2011. Mind explaining why he wasn't ousted then? Or why you skipped those dates and went all the way back to 2006 before the recession? Yeah, everyone was riding high before the recession ... we know ...

When revenue in just about all divisions drop to near 2006 levels, you've got a problem.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-income-by-segment-2012-10

That would be the Pre-Post-PC era.

So Microsoft releases the first stable version of Windows 7 on February 22 of 2011 and a year later you're calling a 1/3 drop in Windows sales "frightening"? Perhaps they were just coming down from everyone's move to Windows 7? I mean you (hopefully) only need to buy that once for your machine.

When revenue in just about all divisions drop to near 2006 levels, you've got a problem.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-income-by-segment-2012-10

As much as they tried to paint Google as the bad guy, it was Apple who refused to negotiate.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple-no-longer-has-google-based-maps-on-the-iphone-2012-9

Apple tried to negotiate with Google

I don't know who's the bigger moron, you or the guys moding you up.