Note that generics are not identical to branded drugs; I believe the FDA has a +/-20% bioavailability tolerance. For medications with broad dose-response curves (e.g. most painkillers, probably lots of other classes of drugs) this isn't a big deal, but for other medications it can be. As I understand it, psychiatric medications often have narrower dose-response curves (disclaimer - IANAD).
I can certainly see how being an Oracle puppet would make it hard to trust his coverage of the Oracle/Google spat. I don't see how it affects his take on the contents of the NZ bill, particularly since the text of the bill is available and no one has countered his assertions!
Also, I'm not "defending" him. I don't know if he is or is not a shill, and I don't care. But he made verifiable statements about the content of the bill. All I want to know is, are his statements wrong?
I don't get it. Let's stipulate that he is an Oracle puppet. Why would that incentivize him to lie about what the bill actually covers? Regardless of his incentives, is he wrong that not all software patents would be prevented under this bill?
Disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee, so I probably have some devious motives, too.
Rather than implying that Microsoft's system is broken, it seems that another possibility is that you had a shitty manager. Is there a performance review system that ensures that good employees are fairly rewarded?
What's the alternative? If there were some objective measure of performance then this would be an easy problem to solve, but that's not the world we live in. When you've got 100K employees, trying to come up with a consistent scheme seems to be a reasonable goal, but tricky to implement. Also, I've seen complaints about fairness with regards to every evaluation scheme I'm aware of.
I think the point was, how many of those billion dollar businesses did he inherit? Doesn't the emergence of, say, SharePoint, show that he didn't just extract money from existing profitable businesses? Microsoft seems to have done pretty well at creating new profitable businesses under his tenure, but they're not the sexy consumer products that people like talking about.
In the ML family of languages (e.g. OCaml, F#) declarations are only visible to code that occurs syntactically later. This has obvious disadvantages, but also the benefit of making dependencies obvious.
I often write synchronous methods that include control flow that nests three deep (say try/finally, if/then/else, and a for loop). Often it's easier to read this code than it would be if everything were split out into separate named methods.
Why would the same not be true of asynchronous methods, assuming that the technology was there to enable it (as it is in C#)?
Even at Microsoft there are several open source projects (though maybe fewer than you'd hope for a company their size). See F# for one compelling (IMO) example. And it's not the same thing, but Microsoft publishes way more research than the other tech giants.
Did Google provide the APIs required for MSFT to show ads? Did Google's obligations to content owners not apply to the other platforms where ad-free official clients existed?
What's a "local" search? Is the behavior you describe observed when "Files" or "Settings" are selected in the "What to search" box, or only when it's set to "Everything" or the web options?
No, group policy is used in enterprises to disable things on a company-wide basis. By all accounts (even the original article) it's easy for end users to disable.
There were plenty of things that doomed Surface RT's initial rollout to failure. It may have done well with focus groups, and I'm not convinced that it was an objectively poor product to the extent that it was guaranteed to fail. But right off the bat they had poor marketing combined with poor distribution (Surfaces were only available online or in Microsoft stores, of which there aren't very many, so very few people could try before buying). Even once they started allowing Surfaces to be sold through other physical retailers, they did a poor job training salespeople and getting attractive placement in stores. And the RT is also just a hard product to sell - there are lots of aspects that are really nice, but it's lacking a simple elevator pitch.
Consumer market, or more generally speaking? They have lots of products doing very well in the market, as their billions of dollars per quarter in profit indicate. SharePoint, Dynamics, Visual Studio, ...
One problem is distribution. They don't have the network of stores that Apple does, and they didn't make Surfaces available in other retailers until quite a while after release. This made it impossible for most people to try before buying.
Another problem is messaging - it's very hard to concisely describe Windows RT's role in a way that people can grasp. It doesn't run legacy software, but it does run Office. Is it a laptop, or a tablet, or what?
This is only true to the extent that they can monetize that discoverability. The problem is that Amazon can freeload by offering a lower price without facing the high costs of retail real estate, etc. and people will discover books at B&N but buy them on Amazon.
Well, with real property there are things like adverse possession [1]. This isn't exactly "use it or lose it", but it does contain the idea that if rights aren't exercised there may be implicit acquiescence to another's actions.
No, but I'm having a hard time envisioning a regulatory body akin to the FDA for all software. And even ingredient lists contain terms like "natural flavors" which hide some arguably important aspects of the composition.
In a post-copyright world, how can you force someone to release their modifications to your code? You couldn't argue that they were violating the terms of your copyright, because there is no copyright (in such a hypothetical world)! The GPL depends on copyright law to provide its teeth.
Revenue was up this quarter. The surface fiasco dinged profit a bit, but financially they're still in great shape. Microsoft is not really fundamentally about Windows anymore, they've now got a diverse portfolio of businesses.
Complicating the "Microsoft corrupted the virtuous Skype" story is the fact that Skype appears in the PRISM slides dating to before Microsoft's purchase of it.