Someone Needs to Buy their Copy-Editor a Dictionary of Proverbs

It is reported that Steve Ballmer said, on the subject of whether Windows 7 will succeed where Windows Vista has failed, ‘I am optimistic, but the proof will be in the pudding.’ This is strange, because ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ is one of the rare proverbial phrases that actually makes sense without gloss from a scholar of Semi-Early Modern English. (That said, it makes more sense if you know that ‘proof’ used to be used to mean ‘test’.)

Speaking of eating, Microsoft acquired Danger, a maverick Blackberry-alternative, last year. Last week they accidentally blew it up. This is bad news for Sidekick and Hiptop users, especially if you were running your business from your contacts stored on their cloudy servers. Will this dent confidence in Windows Azure, their attempt to jump on the coat-tails of Google App Engine and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?