Apple’s radical notion is that touchscreen personal computers should make severely different tradeoffs than traditional computers — and that you can’t design one system that does it all. Windows 8 is trying to have it all, and I don’t think that can be done. You can’t make something conceptually lightweight if it’s carrying 25 years of Windows baggage.

Yep. It's stunning that people don't get what Apple is doing. They tend to equate "getting it" with being a fanboy. Apple now finds this to be an entertaining thing to think about while counting money.

I like a lot of what they're doing here, but everything about it screams "catch up with Apple". It takes away from it significantly.

I told you so. I knew that Steve Ballmer could talk all he wanted about how Microsoft would continue to support non-Microsoft platforms, but that there was no way he’d actually do it. The first proof is here. Digium, the company behind the popular open-source Asterisk private-branch exchange (PBX) program, has announced that Skype has unilaterally ended its deal that allowed Asterisk to work with Skype.

Lamers.

And on top of that you can't use a bluetooth headset with the iPhone app. How is this not priority #1?

Microsoft will start to fail within six quarters. Blank put a timeline on Microsoft suffering the kind of huge loss that drove IBM to restructure itself back in 1993: six quarters from now. He thinks Steve Ballmer is a "miserable failure" and that the board should be blamed for not replacing him. He also suggests that buying Nokia and installing Stephen Elop as CEO might be a solution.

And Active Directory? Exchange? Office?

I'm not sure what he means by doomed.

Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker, said on Feb. 11 that it will use Microsoft’s Windows Phone software as its primary mobile-phone platform, replacing its own Symbian software. Intel and Nokia had jointly developed an alternative operating system called MeeGo, an attempt by both companies to break into the market for smartphones, which is dominated by Google Inc.’s Android and Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

Holy crap. I've been stupid busy and I mostly missed this. What I did hear I thought I heard wrong, but no...Simbian is dead. Wow, a lot.