This person (jackg) either does not know or realize that a great software engineer can use any platform, language, and tool to do whatever she needs to achieve. I'm also not a big fan of his own choices of "trendy" technologies. This post almost seems like trolling IMO.
I'm not sure if I can totally agree with the author. I understand his pain, but email isn't the most secured place. If your email is being "watched" by someone else, then that someone else can access other web services that you own WITHOUT requiring to type passwords! I know that it is very rare to have your email being watched, but in security, even the most rare case should be taken into consideration. It's a trade off between user experience and security. This is something you find very often in software engineering.
It's too early to say anything about Office on Windows 8. What Microsoft showed today was Windows 8, not Office. I'm sure Microsoft will has something for Office on Windows 8 with touch interface in mind. So far, I haven't seen any good office productivity applications on touch interface. I hope Microsoft impresses me.
What we need to focus here is this...despite the decrease in PC sales, Microsoft managed to grow. They did not just grow a little, but they grew tremendously. 30%? that's a huge number for a company like Microsoft. Nonetheless, Apple has reached another huge milestone in their history.
I've been using Bing since I found the Bing Rewards (http://www.bing.com/rewards), which gives you a point per 2 searches and lets you redeem the points for something later on. I have not found myself going back to Google, yet.
I really hope that I'm not using anything you created on the web. I would hate to be a customer of a service whose owner think 150,000 users are insignificant.
I'm pretty sure they aren't making as much money as they want, though. If they make some deal out of Youtube, it would be win-win. Plus, another win for users (as long as it's free or cost at a decent price).
Pretty cool. Why not have another column for comments instead of making users to click? Maybe put this as an option for users to select, because I'm sure there are a lot of people who are using widescreen monitors and are not fully utilizing it. I'm suggesting this as an option, because there are other batch of people who uses vertical mode.
I doubt that Google ever tried to hire only MS/PhDs. I went through interviews and got an offer when I was only a BSCS student. I also know a lot of people who don't have MS/PhDs and work at Google.
On your 2nd point, I totally agree with you that self-taught programmers should actually get a degree in CS or any related major. Although the programming classes might bore them out, there will be courses and professors who will take them to somewhere they would have never known before. This is just my generalization and, of course, will not apply to everyone ;)
SO probably doesn't want too many unregistered users floating around. Also, one of success metrics for an Q&A site is the number of registered users. So, it does make sense to force users to go through almost painless process of registering before they really start engaging in the site.
I guess this is a reason why it does not have recent blogs from some of the sites. Otherwise, it's definitely something I'd use