Hey now. Don't get your politics up in my cool technology. The Volt is some cool shit even if it's just an intermediary step on the way to better solution. Please do not troll the Volt.
(The Volt includes an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from space. Do not taunt the Volt.)
Really, as a corporation I never want my defense to be, "Oh yeah? Well, the only way you can tell us what to do with our property is just to take it over entirely." Because even if that's true, why draw attention to the nationalization option?
It's kind of like telling the biggest guy in a bar that he can't stop you from talking to his girlfriend unless he kicks your ass. Or maybe it's more like having right-of-way as a pedestrian in a crosswalk when a Range Rover hits you -- it's possible in life to be right and still clearly lose.
It would be nice if people realized that you do need to actually understand something before you criticize it. She does not demonize people who fail (through bad luck or otherwise).
No, and neither did Jesus tell people they couldn't use birth control -- but since people who claim to be his followers do so everyday in the modern world in his name, it's topical.
Equally, I've yet to converse with a person who models their life on Objectivism who does not believe, in essense, that people who are successful in life are so and other people are not solely because the former worked harder.
Her point is that failure is not morally superior to success and that those who fail at something do not have the right to enslave those who succeed simply their need is greater - the essence of forced redistribution of wealth. The *right* is the issue here, nobody has anything against charity. If you have a friend who was unlucky in some way, then, if you call yourself his friend, you should help him. He doesn't have the right to take something by force simply because he needs it.
My argument isn't that you have to pay taxes because someone else needs something you have and therefore deserves it; that whole line of thought is a straw man. In Rand's time there probably were people who believed as such, and I think her work is a decent and interesting reaction to that. But today? Straw man.
My argument isn't that other people deserve some small portion of the fruits of your success because they need it; my argument is that they deserve it because they helped you get it, and you could not have succeeded either to as great a degree or at all without them.
By the way, it is very revealing of the confused and frightened collectivist mentality when people think that their course in life is determined primarily by luck.
There's another straw man.
I didn't say that your or my course of life is determined primarily by luck; however, some level of good fortune is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for success. If you disagree, find me a captain of industry who died of cancer as a child.
To look at it another way, a Tiger Woods or a Michael Jordan is a rare thing. They worked hard for their successes in their respective sports, obviously -- but equally, lots of people work as hard and go nowhere. To be a great success in life almost always takes both hard work and some natural talent or luck as appropriate. That doesn't mean that someone who works hard doesn't generally do better than someone doesn't, and it doesn't mean that someone who catches the right breaks doesn't generally do better than someone who doesn't.
Let me know when you can do that without the existence of roads, electricity, goods or raw materials you didn't yourself procure, police to deter other people from just taking what you made, etc.
I have the feeling you're arguing against a point I wasn't making. Basically, my point is that society expecting to benefit in return from your efforts (usually implemented in the form of taxation which in its ideal form buys societal goods) is neither theft nor unethical.
Excellence should and does have benefits. The thing is, that excellence while partially or even mostly yours, could not exist without the efforts of others as well.
If you have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants. But you still do see further.
It's a work that makes sense in its time as a reaction to Soviet-style communism, and it does correctly point out flaws in communism, but frankly, just because communism is flawed and unworkable does not mean the exact polar opposite of communism is brilliant or feasible.
It's the kind of book still that appeals to a certain kind of young person who believes themselves to be hardworking and brilliant, and who has yet to encounter serious hardship in their life. It's easy from that place in your life to imagine other people as incompetent leeches who are plotting to steal your shit. The problem is, that's not reality. First, because of my point upthread that the things you make are mostly yours but were never all yours; second, because sometimes in life, shit just happens.
I know a guy for whom, professionally and personally, everything has gone his way. He's never had a bad boss. He's never had a bad job. He's never gotten fired or screwed because of nepotism or office politics. He's never had a whole company he worked for go under or been laid off as a merger made his position redundant. People above him have consistently retired or changed jobs precisely just as he was qualfied enough to replace them. He never had to drop out of school to take care of a sick mother. He's never been seriously injured himself.
And to be fair, he's a smart guy and he works hard. If life has let you be that guy, it's not so hard to feel like people who are less successful must all deserve it because they're lazy or stupid.
But I equally know a lot of people who are as smart or smarter, and who work as hard or harder, and have caught some of those bad breaks. Maybe they're (numerically, not a judgement call) the biggest earners and most productive person at their company, but layoff time comes around and they're not the guy who kisses up to the boss. Maybe they picked a job that seemed promising but the company turned out to be defrauding the government and got taken down hardcore. Maybe they picked a job they loved and were great at at a company that, ten years later, just couldn't make money despite every one of their projects being a success. The list of possibilities goes on and on.
The reality is that for every person who's actually trying to leech off the system, there are a dozen who are just like you but not as lucky. They won't be down on their luck forever, but sometimes shit happens in life and you're not a productive enough member of society as fast as you'd like. To demonize those people, to assume that their lack of fortune somehow makes them inferior to you and worthy of contempt, is juvenile.
It's a nice idea, the Ayn Rand dichotomy -- but one that most people eventually outgrow, either because their luck runs out or they have an ounce of empathy to appreciate it happening to someone else.
In that case, what do all you leeches do when the producers decline to participate in the partnership any more?
Wow. FYI, Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction.
I have a good job and pay plenty of taxes. The difference between us is that I view them as the cost I pay for civilization rather than something that was stolen from me.
I agree with you that a degree arms race is stupid and counterproductive, but for the most part my experiences working/interviewing as a developer do not reflect what you're saying.
Getting past HR people who have no idea about technology is a perennial problem as a developer, but in my experience a higher degree is in most cases not the best or even a good way to surmount this hurdle.
If someone truly believes in the principal that one person's production should be forcibly taken and given to someone that an arbitrary authority has decided needs it more then that person should lead by example.
You're arguing from a faulty premise: that of the myth of one person's production.
Anything a person who dwells in civilization produces is the result of a partnership between that person and the society in which they live, without which their production (to some small or large degree) would be either impossible or less. Therefore, logically, the fruits of that production also logically belong in part to that person and in part to society.
It's not about redistributing what's yours; it's about your partner in a venture getting their cut.
I hear that. Last week I was setting up a machine at home for Java development (I'm doing.NET work professionally right now, but I've also done years of Java dev and might well go back to it for a future project, so I like to try to keep my hand in) and seeing the Oracle logo on Java installers broke my heart.
I used Sparcs in school and I've had a soft spot for Sun since, even when they did stupid things. Oracle I've never liked and years of working with the Oracle database and/or Peoplesoft have not improved my opinion.
They also, amazingly, make Apple look bad at sales/marketing. I've worked on dozens of projects that used Oracle as their database, and of them, I would say one actually needed something that expensive/heavyweight. The rest could have done just as well with something cheaper or most likely free-as-in-beer. Instead they were paying Oracle a boatload of money for software and spending another boatload of money on Oracle DBAs who largely performed tasks that were handled by developers on projects using other databases.
(This is all horribly offtopic at this point; I apologize to anyone else who's not interested.)
I do have a B.S. in Computer Science. I felt like that was pretty important for my first couple jobs but I'm honestly not sure how relevant it is or isn't at this point, about ten years in.
It seems like the industry's still in the mindset of not giving out much in the way of raises and it being necessary to switch jobs periodically to work up to a bigger salary. Sometimes you price yourself out of a job that way, but for the most part, my experience is that people will tend to offer you a salary close to (and usually more than) what you've been making.
The best time to look for a job is when you don't need a job, because if a prospective employer wants to give you crappy pay, you can just say thanks but no thanks.
Other than always trying to improve your technical skills, I think a few 'soft' skills are helpful in landing better (not necessarily salary-wise) jobs.
One is interviewing -- you really do get better at it as you do more of it, and I was terrible when I started out. Now I'm pretty good at going in and making a solid case that I've handled situations like the one the would-be employer is trying to solve before and that I can handle theirs as well.
The second is a low-effort version of networking. I'm not talking about going to user groups or conferences and trying to meet people (although I guess you could do that), more just that you try to keep in touch with people that you've worked with who go elsewhere, or stay when you go elsewhere. Shoot those people an e-mail once in a while, try to make time to have lunch with them and catch up, things like that. If you like the people you work with and get along with them, this can actually be fun. I've gotten several jobs (some skipping some or all of the normal interview/applicant process) basically because someone I had worked with in the past was a year or two later at a company who needed to pick up an extra person, and they knew from past experience I could do a good job with it.
This is also a good way to keep your technical skills current in a broad sense and help you interview -- maybe you've never worked on a WCF project, but now this guy you worked with a year or two ago is working on one and can tell you about it over lunch. Now you're prepared to talk more intelligently about the technology if it comes up in an interview (not claim to have done it or fake your way through it, but just, be able to understand how it relates or doesn't relate to what you have done) or understand when you might or might not want to try using it. Probably you pick up some extra details about pitfalls or ways not to use it, which are usually hard to pick up in technical documentation or cert study material.
If any of this is too obvious, I apologize, and if any of the advice comes off as condescending, I apologize for that too -- I'm just trying to help. I got lucky in that I made a few good moves in my career almost by accident and it's only in retrospect that I think I understand why some of them worked out for me.
You know, there's probably some of that (rent control skewing the market), too. Being in Harlem for a week certainly doesn't make me a Harlem expert. I just don't think I've been anywhere else that I've spent even as much time where I could hear gunshots or police sirens almost every hour of the day. The worst parts of Oakland, maybe.
(I've heard that Harlem has gotten nicer since then, so it's very possible that my experience no longer reflects reality, too.)
Oh, no doubt -- I was just trying to put the salary figures in the article in context. As in "these people get paid more than I or many developers do, but they've also chosen to make sacrifices to do it that I and others have chosen not to make." I'm glad you made a choice that's working out for you even if it isn't the choice I made.
Along the same lines, high travel jobs also tend to pay more, and they're also in a category that I didn't have a problem with or even preferred when I was younger and singler, but would avoid now.
Huh. I live somewhere with a slightly lower cost of living, I'd bet you and I have pretty similar years/kinds of experience and do pretty similar work, and I've consistently made a fair bit more money. Even last year with its rough market and not working for a quarter or third or so of the year. I don't say any of that to brag -- I know a lot of people do better than I do -- I'm just trying to lay out a case for you probably being underpaid.
Granted, I've mostly done contract/consulting work, but you might want to try shopping your resume around.
That's an interesting distinction, and it makes me wonder if the smartest move Microsoft could make would be to focus like hell on producing a tablet set up to work great for business purposes. I can imagine meeting rooms in which everyone's got a tablet in front of them instead of a pile of dead tree docs.
Maybe throw in some kind of functionality where I can 'ping' a page in my Word doc and everyone in the meeting who's set up to 'follow' me on that doc can see which sentence I'm looking at / talking about, etc. That'd also be pretty handy for people that were attending a meeting from off site without having to shoehorn everything into a WebEx.
You figure strong / easy to use Powerpoint / projector integration would be easy. There's a lot of potential there.
Yeah, because millions of people lined up to buy the Kin last month because they were such big Microsoft fans. Or the Zune, since you mention it.... no. Sorry, your statement makes absolutely no sense. No sober person could manage a rational defense of it.
I mean, sure, Microsoft makes money off of nearly every desktop computer sale even though they don't make desktop hardware, but people aren't rushing to sell tablet PCs with Windows 7 on it currently. If some of the market goes to tablets over desktops and Microsoft's getting close to 0% of that market rather than almost 100% of the desktop market, that's a big loss for them.
Frankly, with just a little bit of timely effort they should be able to get a sizeable chunk of a growing tablet market. We're not talking phones here with tiny displays -- a huge swath of millions of applications written over the years for desktop Windows machines could easily run on a tablet PC running a Windows variant. Ditto a lot of old school XBox games, really, since hardware has kept getting better and cheaper since its introduction. (A lot of those games wouldn't translate great to tablet style UI, but I bet some would, too.) As long as they have an OS offering that also includes the basic sort of tablet specific functionality people expect from something like an iPad, I don't see why this couldn't be a big market for them.
And, hell, even if you hate Microsoft's guts, competing hard and early in this market (instead of sitting on their ass until Apple had an insurmountable lead like with the iPod/Zune) can only force Apple and other would-be tablet makers to respond with cheaper prices and/or stronger offerings.
Out of curiousity, in what market? (That's something the story glosses over -- living in NYC is expensive, so while $150k is still a good salary, it might only be like $80k somewhere cheaper to live.)
Yeah, that whole industry (as a developer) is pretty infamous for paying a better salary than other development jobs in the same market, but also being much higher stress and demanding an incredible amount of hours.
It's not a trade-off I would make at this point in my life, but back when I was single and childless I probably would have.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. Moderated you wrong and can't undo it so I'm posting to wipe that out. Sorry.
Thanks! Although that (my) comment is modded a higher than I think it deserves right now, so it probably could've stayed.
yah but i find it very interesting that an election is right around the corner its more like he plained it to be this way
So what you're saying is... you're distrustful of America having a president who can actually plan more than a year ahead of time?
Isn't that a minimum standard we should be, if not proud of, appreciative of?
Hey now. Don't get your politics up in my cool technology. The Volt is some cool shit even if it's just an intermediary step on the way to better solution. Please do not troll the Volt.
(The Volt includes an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from space. Do not taunt the Volt.)
I don't believe Iraq's actually stable, and I don't think its government will survive, say, 20 years.
But I hope that I'm wrong on both counts.
Really, as a corporation I never want my defense to be, "Oh yeah? Well, the only way you can tell us what to do with our property is just to take it over entirely." Because even if that's true, why draw attention to the nationalization option?
It's kind of like telling the biggest guy in a bar that he can't stop you from talking to his girlfriend unless he kicks your ass. Or maybe it's more like having right-of-way as a pedestrian in a crosswalk when a Range Rover hits you -- it's possible in life to be right and still clearly lose.
Leading = market share.
It would be nice if people realized that you do need to actually understand something before you criticize it. She does not demonize people who fail (through bad luck or otherwise).
No, and neither did Jesus tell people they couldn't use birth control -- but since people who claim to be his followers do so everyday in the modern world in his name, it's topical.
Equally, I've yet to converse with a person who models their life on Objectivism who does not believe, in essense, that people who are successful in life are so and other people are not solely because the former worked harder.
Her point is that failure is not morally superior to success and that those who fail at something do not have the right to enslave those who succeed simply their need is greater - the essence of forced redistribution of wealth. The *right* is the issue here, nobody has anything against charity. If you have a friend who was unlucky in some way, then, if you call yourself his friend, you should help him. He doesn't have the right to take something by force simply because he needs it.
My argument isn't that you have to pay taxes because someone else needs something you have and therefore deserves it; that whole line of thought is a straw man. In Rand's time there probably were people who believed as such, and I think her work is a decent and interesting reaction to that. But today? Straw man.
My argument isn't that other people deserve some small portion of the fruits of your success because they need it; my argument is that they deserve it because they helped you get it, and you could not have succeeded either to as great a degree or at all without them.
By the way, it is very revealing of the confused and frightened collectivist mentality when people think that their course in life is determined primarily by luck.
There's another straw man.
I didn't say that your or my course of life is determined primarily by luck; however, some level of good fortune is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for success. If you disagree, find me a captain of industry who died of cancer as a child.
To look at it another way, a Tiger Woods or a Michael Jordan is a rare thing. They worked hard for their successes in their respective sports, obviously -- but equally, lots of people work as hard and go nowhere. To be a great success in life almost always takes both hard work and some natural talent or luck as appropriate. That doesn't mean that someone who works hard doesn't generally do better than someone doesn't, and it doesn't mean that someone who catches the right breaks doesn't generally do better than someone who doesn't.
Let me know when you can do that without the existence of roads, electricity, goods or raw materials you didn't yourself procure, police to deter other people from just taking what you made, etc.
I have the feeling you're arguing against a point I wasn't making. Basically, my point is that society expecting to benefit in return from your efforts (usually implemented in the form of taxation which in its ideal form buys societal goods) is neither theft nor unethical.
Excellence should and does have benefits. The thing is, that excellence while partially or even mostly yours, could not exist without the efforts of others as well.
If you have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants. But you still do see further.
So why again does the society get to own a share of what I produce as my "venture partner"?
Those are the aforementioned taxes you paid. Some people try to argue that taxes are inherently theft by the jealous or lazy from virtuous producers.
Yes, it was but the principal behind it is not.
Clearly, I disagree.
It's a work that makes sense in its time as a reaction to Soviet-style communism, and it does correctly point out flaws in communism, but frankly, just because communism is flawed and unworkable does not mean the exact polar opposite of communism is brilliant or feasible.
It's the kind of book still that appeals to a certain kind of young person who believes themselves to be hardworking and brilliant, and who has yet to encounter serious hardship in their life. It's easy from that place in your life to imagine other people as incompetent leeches who are plotting to steal your shit. The problem is, that's not reality. First, because of my point upthread that the things you make are mostly yours but were never all yours; second, because sometimes in life, shit just happens.
I know a guy for whom, professionally and personally, everything has gone his way. He's never had a bad boss. He's never had a bad job. He's never gotten fired or screwed because of nepotism or office politics. He's never had a whole company he worked for go under or been laid off as a merger made his position redundant. People above him have consistently retired or changed jobs precisely just as he was qualfied enough to replace them. He never had to drop out of school to take care of a sick mother. He's never been seriously injured himself.
And to be fair, he's a smart guy and he works hard. If life has let you be that guy, it's not so hard to feel like people who are less successful must all deserve it because they're lazy or stupid.
But I equally know a lot of people who are as smart or smarter, and who work as hard or harder, and have caught some of those bad breaks. Maybe they're (numerically, not a judgement call) the biggest earners and most productive person at their company, but layoff time comes around and they're not the guy who kisses up to the boss. Maybe they picked a job that seemed promising but the company turned out to be defrauding the government and got taken down hardcore. Maybe they picked a job they loved and were great at at a company that, ten years later, just couldn't make money despite every one of their projects being a success. The list of possibilities goes on and on.
The reality is that for every person who's actually trying to leech off the system, there are a dozen who are just like you but not as lucky. They won't be down on their luck forever, but sometimes shit happens in life and you're not a productive enough member of society as fast as you'd like. To demonize those people, to assume that their lack of fortune somehow makes them inferior to you and worthy of contempt, is juvenile.
It's a nice idea, the Ayn Rand dichotomy -- but one that most people eventually outgrow, either because their luck runs out or they have an ounce of empathy to appreciate it happening to someone else.
In that case, what do all you leeches do when the producers decline to participate in the partnership any more?
Wow. FYI, Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction.
I have a good job and pay plenty of taxes. The difference between us is that I view them as the cost I pay for civilization rather than something that was stolen from me.
I agree with you that a degree arms race is stupid and counterproductive, but for the most part my experiences working/interviewing as a developer do not reflect what you're saying.
Getting past HR people who have no idea about technology is a perennial problem as a developer, but in my experience a higher degree is in most cases not the best or even a good way to surmount this hurdle.
YMMV.
If someone truly believes in the principal that one person's production should be forcibly taken and given to someone that an arbitrary authority has decided needs it more then that person should lead by example.
You're arguing from a faulty premise: that of the myth of one person's production.
Anything a person who dwells in civilization produces is the result of a partnership between that person and the society in which they live, without which their production (to some small or large degree) would be either impossible or less. Therefore, logically, the fruits of that production also logically belong in part to that person and in part to society.
It's not about redistributing what's yours; it's about your partner in a venture getting their cut.
Now that's some good trolling. We need a +1: Troll mod for trolling that really raises the bar.
I hear that. Last week I was setting up a machine at home for Java development (I'm doing .NET work professionally right now, but I've also done years of Java dev and might well go back to it for a future project, so I like to try to keep my hand in) and seeing the Oracle logo on Java installers broke my heart.
I used Sparcs in school and I've had a soft spot for Sun since, even when they did stupid things. Oracle I've never liked and years of working with the Oracle database and/or Peoplesoft have not improved my opinion.
Oracle makes Apple look open.
They also, amazingly, make Apple look bad at sales/marketing. I've worked on dozens of projects that used Oracle as their database, and of them, I would say one actually needed something that expensive/heavyweight. The rest could have done just as well with something cheaper or most likely free-as-in-beer. Instead they were paying Oracle a boatload of money for software and spending another boatload of money on Oracle DBAs who largely performed tasks that were handled by developers on projects using other databases.
(This is all horribly offtopic at this point; I apologize to anyone else who's not interested.)
I do have a B.S. in Computer Science. I felt like that was pretty important for my first couple jobs but I'm honestly not sure how relevant it is or isn't at this point, about ten years in.
It seems like the industry's still in the mindset of not giving out much in the way of raises and it being necessary to switch jobs periodically to work up to a bigger salary. Sometimes you price yourself out of a job that way, but for the most part, my experience is that people will tend to offer you a salary close to (and usually more than) what you've been making.
The best time to look for a job is when you don't need a job, because if a prospective employer wants to give you crappy pay, you can just say thanks but no thanks.
Other than always trying to improve your technical skills, I think a few 'soft' skills are helpful in landing better (not necessarily salary-wise) jobs.
One is interviewing -- you really do get better at it as you do more of it, and I was terrible when I started out. Now I'm pretty good at going in and making a solid case that I've handled situations like the one the would-be employer is trying to solve before and that I can handle theirs as well.
The second is a low-effort version of networking. I'm not talking about going to user groups or conferences and trying to meet people (although I guess you could do that), more just that you try to keep in touch with people that you've worked with who go elsewhere, or stay when you go elsewhere. Shoot those people an e-mail once in a while, try to make time to have lunch with them and catch up, things like that. If you like the people you work with and get along with them, this can actually be fun. I've gotten several jobs (some skipping some or all of the normal interview/applicant process) basically because someone I had worked with in the past was a year or two later at a company who needed to pick up an extra person, and they knew from past experience I could do a good job with it.
This is also a good way to keep your technical skills current in a broad sense and help you interview -- maybe you've never worked on a WCF project, but now this guy you worked with a year or two ago is working on one and can tell you about it over lunch. Now you're prepared to talk more intelligently about the technology if it comes up in an interview (not claim to have done it or fake your way through it, but just, be able to understand how it relates or doesn't relate to what you have done) or understand when you might or might not want to try using it. Probably you pick up some extra details about pitfalls or ways not to use it, which are usually hard to pick up in technical documentation or cert study material.
If any of this is too obvious, I apologize, and if any of the advice comes off as condescending, I apologize for that too -- I'm just trying to help. I got lucky in that I made a few good moves in my career almost by accident and it's only in retrospect that I think I understand why some of them worked out for me.
You know, there's probably some of that (rent control skewing the market), too. Being in Harlem for a week certainly doesn't make me a Harlem expert. I just don't think I've been anywhere else that I've spent even as much time where I could hear gunshots or police sirens almost every hour of the day. The worst parts of Oakland, maybe.
(I've heard that Harlem has gotten nicer since then, so it's very possible that my experience no longer reflects reality, too.)
Oh, no doubt -- I was just trying to put the salary figures in the article in context. As in "these people get paid more than I or many developers do, but they've also chosen to make sacrifices to do it that I and others have chosen not to make." I'm glad you made a choice that's working out for you even if it isn't the choice I made.
Along the same lines, high travel jobs also tend to pay more, and they're also in a category that I didn't have a problem with or even preferred when I was younger and singler, but would avoid now.
Huh. I live somewhere with a slightly lower cost of living, I'd bet you and I have pretty similar years/kinds of experience and do pretty similar work, and I've consistently made a fair bit more money. Even last year with its rough market and not working for a quarter or third or so of the year. I don't say any of that to brag -- I know a lot of people do better than I do -- I'm just trying to lay out a case for you probably being underpaid.
Granted, I've mostly done contract/consulting work, but you might want to try shopping your resume around.
That's an interesting distinction, and it makes me wonder if the smartest move Microsoft could make would be to focus like hell on producing a tablet set up to work great for business purposes. I can imagine meeting rooms in which everyone's got a tablet in front of them instead of a pile of dead tree docs.
Maybe throw in some kind of functionality where I can 'ping' a page in my Word doc and everyone in the meeting who's set up to 'follow' me on that doc can see which sentence I'm looking at / talking about, etc. That'd also be pretty handy for people that were attending a meeting from off site without having to shoehorn everything into a WebEx.
You figure strong / easy to use Powerpoint / projector integration would be easy. There's a lot of potential there.
Yeah, because millions of people lined up to buy the Kin last month because they were such big Microsoft fans. Or the Zune, since you mention it. ... no. Sorry, your statement makes absolutely no sense. No sober person could manage a rational defense of it.
Eh... yes and no.
I mean, sure, Microsoft makes money off of nearly every desktop computer sale even though they don't make desktop hardware, but people aren't rushing to sell tablet PCs with Windows 7 on it currently. If some of the market goes to tablets over desktops and Microsoft's getting close to 0% of that market rather than almost 100% of the desktop market, that's a big loss for them.
Frankly, with just a little bit of timely effort they should be able to get a sizeable chunk of a growing tablet market. We're not talking phones here with tiny displays -- a huge swath of millions of applications written over the years for desktop Windows machines could easily run on a tablet PC running a Windows variant. Ditto a lot of old school XBox games, really, since hardware has kept getting better and cheaper since its introduction. (A lot of those games wouldn't translate great to tablet style UI, but I bet some would, too.) As long as they have an OS offering that also includes the basic sort of tablet specific functionality people expect from something like an iPad, I don't see why this couldn't be a big market for them.
And, hell, even if you hate Microsoft's guts, competing hard and early in this market (instead of sitting on their ass until Apple had an insurmountable lead like with the iPod/Zune) can only force Apple and other would-be tablet makers to respond with cheaper prices and/or stronger offerings.
Out of curiousity, in what market? (That's something the story glosses over -- living in NYC is expensive, so while $150k is still a good salary, it might only be like $80k somewhere cheaper to live.)
Yeah, that whole industry (as a developer) is pretty infamous for paying a better salary than other development jobs in the same market, but also being much higher stress and demanding an incredible amount of hours.
It's not a trade-off I would make at this point in my life, but back when I was single and childless I probably would have.