Microsoft on the other hand, decided to try to destroy open source and bury it like it did with other companies before (failing to see that this was a grassroot, difuse movement), basically alienating one generation of developers. Not simple developers mind you, but the superstars, the trend-setters, the guys who write tech-blogs, found innovative start-up and become managers and CIOs in big companies later on.

All of them are dead set against Microsoft and no amount of certification is going to change that now.

Yes, China is the one of world's biggest importers of iron ore, copper and crude oil, not to mention rubber and other commodities. So, althought the sentence "few natural resources" is too general (china is one of the biggest exporters of rare minerals, for instance), it certainly is applicable to a lot of core commodities for manufacturing

Just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean that there is no strong rationale for that.

The reason why google keeps investing in projects different than search is simply to increase usage and accessibility of the internet. By increasing the value of the internet (gmail, orkut, latitude), the ways you can access it (android) and by improving the overall user experience (gwt, chrome), they are basically increasing their market and the appeal of the advertisement in their core search product.

Microsoft, on its turn, knows the value of a good monopoly and the leverage it gives in all your other products. They played this game very successfully in the desktop market, and they know that if they let google run free in the search market, it may eventually be powerful enough to crush any future source of revenue for microsoft in the web.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that any of these guys are doing anything simply out of stupidity, hubris or whatever other reason. They are doing it because there is money involved.

In the company I work for, the development team was first reduced by half (all contractors were let go), and then further sliced by 20%. Nobody from the business/management side was dismissed, and keep in mind that those people's job is just to tell the engineers what to do. Things got to the point that now we have more people giving orders than people to actually follow them through.

Meanwhile, the deadlines got more aggressive, the plans more grandiose, and micromanagement ever larger. Funny thing is, when the projects are late or incomplete, the IT guys are somehow to blame for it.

You could say that not now.

Generally, the beta version is a prototype of the product that comes even before the release candidates. People don't usually pay for beta releases, and it's very uncommon for a product to remain so long in beta, especially when it is already stable, widely deployed and used daily by millions of users.

This curious fact generate especulations about the reasons for that, since so far, no good one was given. What if they decided for instance, that when Gmail is out of beta, the service will be no longer be free and a subscription model will be put in place? Or that the current storage will be available only for premium users? Or that the service will be simply discontinued? The beta versioning could easily provide an excuse for any of those or other changes that could directly impact you, especially after you come to rely strongly on the service.