Elepsis

This article is written confusingly, but he's actually quoting some other person in that bit of text. He then proceeds to reply.

"Knowingly" seems to be the key word here: if you surveyed most Americans (or consumers elsewhere, for that matter) on how many of them know the country of origin for most brands, the results would be very hit or miss. I don't think too many people realize or remember that Samsung is Korean, nor that Nokia is Finnish. And to a concrete example of a Chinese company, I think hardly anyone knows Lenovo's origins.

The article even points out as much: in many cases, the Chinese brands go out of their way to do nothing that would reveal themselves to be Chinese brands. And by the time the brand is successful in a country, I'd suspect that brand's origin will matter very little.

At first glance, this list is a bit of a joke. Just on the first page you see Acco Brands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCO_Brands) and Agere Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agere_Systems), which shows that not even the most rudimentary fact checking went into this effort.

Unfortunate, because I think they're trying to add transparency in an area where it's badly needed. But using such a blatantly inaccurate methodology undermines pretty much everything they're trying to do.

From the (much better) Next Web article which I wish had been linked instead:

Microsoft has persisted in trying to work out a compromise with Apple, but has thus far failed to come to an agreement. The company offered to remove all subscription options from its application, leaving it a non-revenue generating experience on iOS. The offer was rebuffed.

If a service has a subscription option, it seems, and it is not listed in the iOS store, the application cannot, and will not be allowed. That is, unless you are small enough that Apple doesn’t bothers to check. I assume that smaller companies could slip under the radar.

(note for transparency: I worked on the SkyDrive team until a few months ago, but don't know the latest details of this situation.)

Still overwhelmingly true with a few buildings that are exceptions.

... Except that's wrong. It's not fair use to photocopy an entire book and it never has been. Let's not lose sight of the actual laws in our blind rage against DRM.

This is one of the most thoroughly researched and tested facets of Office. I assure you that you're wrong on the discoverability of Office features for the average user: it went up by leaps and bounds with the ribbon, and in fact the entire ribbon was designed to address the fact that the most common feature requests for Office were for things that already existed.

You're definitely right on that. However, if your manager isn't willing or able to effectively argue for your team members, it doesn't matter what the review system is: you'll still get screwed.

The article is completely wrong on this point. In 99% of cases, people are stacked in a sufficiently large group that everyone on your immediate team could hypothetically get a great review.

Wasn't this one of the basic premises of Notifo? As far as I recall, they never did quite figure out the business model, though.

The fact that the cover has an accelerometer shouldn't be interpreted to assume that the tablet doesn't.

You realize Sony is one of the top 10 largest manufacturers of PCs running Windows, right?

Microsoft runs a BizSpark program that, for all intents and purposes, gives startups access to most Microsoft software for free.

http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

How about "it's just not out yet"? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/20/connecting-you...

It's worth pointing out that for a _large_ number of users, the primary copy/paste flow from a Word document is into another Office application (quite often Outlook).

The end result is that you end up with two common flows:

* The program I'm pasting into is another Office app and supports (roughly) the same formatting, or

* The program I'm pasting into is a very rudimentary text-handling program and will just look for the plain-text version of whatever was copied.

Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley by trying and failing to parse Office's output, but I suspect for most people this is a huge red herring.

p.s. I'm a Microsoft employee, but I have nothing to do with how Office handles copy/paste. This is just my opinion.

I think this is another in a long series of articles that mistakes the press coverage for the vision. When journalists say "we're x for y" that's their way of conveying the information in a way that makes sense to us, by relating it to something we already understand (at least usually: I've seen TechCrunch use increasingly esoteric examples for "x" of late).

In some cases the companies themselves use that line in their pitch. This isn't surprising, given that it's such a fast and powerful way to give people a rough idea of what you're doing and how short each presentation at YC demo day is.

But that doesn't change the fact that in either case, this is just shorthand and isn't reflective of the grand vision of any of these companies.

This strikes me as utterly implausible, since the most likely way to get one of these is to get a new car, something that seems to happen on about a 10-year cycle based on the latest data.

It was Target and the New York Times Magazine, for what it's worth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

He did say that were it up to him he'd build it in Hawaii, which would if anything have the opposite set of problems.

Are you suggesting that Apple would ignore a whole technology because it's hard to keep the fact they're working on it secret? Surely you're joking.

Styles were available well before 2007. But hardly anyone knew about or used them until the arrival of the ribbon.

Why do you assume that the Windows Store won't include desktop applications?

I think you're missing the point by taking the 100-year number literally. Don't compare the Korea of today to Pittsburgh in 1912. Rather, note the difference between Pittsburgh in 1912 and Korea in 1912, and observe that in many ways the U.S. (and other Western nations) has been consistently ahead, by some varying but ever-present margin, for pretty much the entirety of that duration. There's no reason that won't change over time, and the fire in the bellies of the people in the other countries to become the best in the world is what will make it happen.

It turns out that "cheap" software at the scale where you're rolling it out for thousands of employees, plus maintenance contracts, plus consulting fees, plus servers needed to manage all those PCs, plus... still add up to be a remarkably lucrative market.

Amazon is undoubtedly a very successful and smart company, but this is just an overwhelming fluff piece.

Just one example: Take AWS for instance. The business had no right to succeed. It violated all sorts of textbook rules about brand elasticity, market positioning, core competency management and so forth. But it was the right game for Amazon.

What in the world is this based on? How about the successful example of LSG Sky Chefs, created from Lufthansa's need to supply food for its airplanes and now the largest provider of airline food worldwide? Or Sodexho, which started out as Marriott's food supplier/catering service? This is business strategy 101: are we good at something? Can we use that to make money from other companies that need the same thing?

Throughout the article the author ascribes brilliant strategic thinking to Amazon while dismissing successes from its competitors as strokes of luck. Sadly, he doesn't bother to provide any evidence of either the presence of strategic thinking at Amazon or the absence of it elsewhere.

Not even the achilles heel he claims he "discovered" is special to Amazon; it has been demonstrated amply by every other company he mentioned: see Apple's simultaneous supply deals and lawsuits with Samsung as just one example of the friends today, foes tomorrow state of business today.

Microsoft's Live ID absolutely supports this when signing up for, among other things, Hotmail accounts, Messenger accounts, etc. It follows the same basic process as Yahoo, including the $0.50 charge that's partially donated to charity.

Perhaps this is too obvious, but this would be killer if it could get integration with Square.

Windows 7 actually supports explicit vertical maximization; dragging the top of a window to the top of the screen will maximize the app vertically but leave its width unchanged.

You laugh, but TOTO is a hugely successful corporation that's spent millions on toilet R&D. If this bathroom doesn't fall into "object of day to day use made into a cherished item" I don't know what does: http://www.totousa.com/Neorest/NeorestSuite.aspx

Agreed that these changes shouldn't be made arbitrarily, but spaces as tag separators has always been my biggest frustration with delicious and is one of the biggest reasons I (to my eventual regret) ended up using Ma.gnolia back in the day.