[jkent]

In Gates' 1996 'The Road Ahead' he was talking about the convergence of devices to what seemed like a mobile, touch screen web browser (within 5 years, a bit optimistic).

He talks about the wallet pc, a sketch of which looks like an iphone in landscape mode.

Why didn't Microsoft try this?

[raganwald]

I owned a TabletPC. I argue they did try it, and did a decent job of it. However, the big roadblock was the fact that they are at the mercy of their hardware vendors.

Consider multi-touch. When Apple decided that multi-touch is the future, they simply started building it into their laptops. If Microsoft decides multi-touch is the future, they build an API and some of the vendors offer a few models with multi-touch and the market decides whether it wants to pay a premium for multi-touch or not.

Meanwhile app vendors sit on the sidelines while everyone plays chicken and egg. This is why tablets went nowhere... the market refused to pay a premium for tablets, so the vendors only made a few, which kept prices high, which kept sales low, and so forth...