"RefineryCMS, Devise, Omniauth, Carrierwave, Unicorn, Rack Rewrite, Fog, New Relic, Foreman, AMQP, and Honeybadger, not to mention the extra magic that Heroku gems throw into the mix (backups and other fun)."
Just going through all those names makes me tired. Its like framework names are to software as band names are to bands.
Windows Mobile still goes strong in the PDA market with retailers and for POS devices. My company makes custom software for WinMo PDAs, and admittedly my opinion is colored by the fact that our software is also a POS (pun intended), but I can't really believe that WinMo once held a dominant market share. Or rather, I can believe it, and can believe that the iPhone had it for lunch.
Yeah, even as a .Net developer who generally has high praise for C# and VS, I agree that the WinRT Surface was DOA. Its exactly like those Android tablets that came out in 2011 with Android 3.x-really nice devices, definitely not garbage, but aren't worth the price they are being sold at. The difference is that was two years ago and Android tablets are finally moving ahead, after dropping in price (Fire, Nook, N7) and improving massively in terms of the OS on parity with iOS (JB and up). MSFT can't afford to enter the market like this two years late.
I'd say that the tablet should'e been priced at 299, with the keyboard cover thrown in. Maybe that'd have increased its popularity. On the plus side it also has file system access, command line, and powershell (for the 1% of the market who are geeky Windows sysadmin types). It also should've been sold at a lot of different stores right out of the gate.