2015-08-28 17:10 GMT+02:00 Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com>:
On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 12:14:33AM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
>
> The continued dominance of Microsoft products even in professional
> and commercial settings, and ongoing efforts to mitigate the
> Microsoft spectrum of security failures and violations,

They are losing dominance and eventually will kick the bucket.

Wouldn't be surprised if they just "re-adjust" to a new market equilibrium. Windows10 easily has the best usability and compatibility. Reliability seems nominal (on par with other OS'es), meaning horrid.

Office is still an absolute bestseller.

Microsoft is a big player in the console/games business.

The .net ecosystem is the most evolved/advanced of all ecosystems -  encompassing pretty much all types of programming, platforms, etc. powered by the amazing Visual Studio.

They finally rebranded Internet Explorer into Edge, and decided it's also a good time to push the browser old-school style.

Bing is offering better and better search results. (Maybe just because Google seems to be getting worse, and definitely less interesting)

Windows Phone and that whole mess still has the potential to do what Microsoft always does: slowly but steadily improve to acceptable. People are surprisingly eager for it to work out; many being burned either on expensive Apple hardware with wacky limitations, or glitchy and inconsistent Android devices.

Won't be surprised if there are significantly more smartphones
than computers and m$'s share there is negligible AFAICT.

This can change really fast - one or two manufacturers offering Windows Phone can provide significance pretty fast. If the device is right, and the price is low. 

When I was much younger thought I would celebrate when
m$ kicks the bucket, but now I have serious doubts that
the next adversary might be more skilled than the scumbags.

This is an interesting statement. Certainly Microsoft is "the evil we know". It's evil is the salesmanship that made it huge - and the software not as geeky as we like.
 
> demonstrates one of the most fundamental laws of human behavior:
> You can't smarten up a chump. IIRC it was W.C. Fields who
> observed, "Trying to smarten up a chump is like trying to teach a
> pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig."
>

I don't care what OS/smartphone many dumb users use, but
your argument applies to politics/voting literally.

I think most users do not lack the intelligence/capability to understand, merely the desire to. They do not see any need, and do not have the "means to learn". When is the last time a manual told you anything useful? The best kind of education most people employ isn't even articles - it's poorly produced youtube videos.

We've lost the "complete broadcast" that TV and newspapers pretty much guaranteed. The mediums we got in return are exceedingly confusing (unclear in intent and purpose) and "narrow" (little bandwidth). I'm still waiting for #nextgen newsreporting.