I've worked with Most Big Retailers and Consumer product companies - Most of them overwhelmingly prefer MS, and are wary of putting their information on the hands of a company which is a direct competitor for most retailers, and a potential competitor for most CPG cos.

Car companies have worked for years to deaden car interiors to block out engine and road noise, This is mostly because for a lot of people, engine noise is just noise, and they would rather not hear it. The amount of deadening applied under the hood, on the firewall, on the floor, on body panels, is stagerring, and then tere are folks who fit even more deadening (I'm not talking the audiophile type - just people who want a quiet car) like rubber undercoatings to reduce road noise Then they realize that this has turned off another demographic that likes to hear this noise. They decide that playing the sound back through speakers (there have been mechanical approaches as well ) was the cheapest option. This way, you could have a car that was quiet most of the time, but could get loud if you wanted it to. Honestly I don't see a problem here. The growl of an engine is just an indicator of its performance . If you designed an intake/exhaust system just to sound good, how is it different from an electronic system which does that ?

If the actual hardware cost is less than 99$, it could have still been possible to sell it at a loss if you were selling it at 99$( cost of R&D, marketing, any other fixed costs spread over the initial run would price it somewhere a lot higher). Since all these have already been written off, and not added to the costing any more, it makes sense to make and sell touchpads as long as the marginal cost of production is less than 99$

http://www.tatadocomo.com/pps-tariff-plans.aspx

A lot of the folks who work with me were dropped overnight into projects they had no clue about, and couldnt get any either , because all the relevant info was with the people who were busy, and no one had any time to transfer the info either. Now that we've learnt the stuff, we've encouraged most of the people to share the info so that others will not have the hard time we had. We use drupal btw. More often than not, its about moving relevant stuff off people's inboxes , and into a content management system that can be acessed by all, besides , searching in drupal is way faster than a mailbox search. Of course all the wikis and CMS's would come to nothing if no one believed it. "buy - in" in management speak . you need it at all levels. and it doesnt stop at setting up a wiki, and leaving it at that. The whole thing is , at the risk of sounding cliched, a process, and some incentive for people to do this ( like karma points for adding stuff) is helpful. you need to have people contributing , and recognize and reward the effort , and make people realize the difference it makes to them. If it just makes the job of , say management or IT better, it wont help . You should be able to show that it helps the people who are contributing to it...