Recently HP announced that it would stop the development of its HP Slate computer which was touted by Microsoft’s Steve Balmer at C.E.S. Their explanation was that they didn’t fell the Windows OS would be profound enough to continue development. This was later followed by Microsoft’s own announcement that they would stop development of the even more hyped and much anticipated Microsoft Courier which thus far has only been relegated to concept art and vaporware. However even so it offered numerous novel and interesting concepts for how users would interact with the beautifully designed dual screens.

Some users have argued that Microsoft’s OS is just fail for tablet computer while others have gone as far as saying that people in general don’t want tablets and that Microsoft is honing in on this direction. I have to completely disagree and I’d have to just point at the relatively successful sales of Apples iPad as validation that there is a market for tablets. I think that there has been and continues to be a market for tablets and until now it has been pretty much an elusive dragon that no one was able to match reality and expectations. I think the difference really is that iPad set it’s expectations very clearly, even with the lack of multitasking support it said to the world this device is for casual computing needs, browsing, entertainment and communication.

The problem with previous tables, such as motion computing M100, HP TC-1000, AT&T EO communicator, or the plethora of other convertible tablets from Toshiba and others were all trying to be more computers than portable. People don’t want laptops with a touch screen, they want an improved mobile computing experience and that’s what the ipad offers. This isn’t to say I don’t want hard core computing to do stuff like design and programming. I think the future will offer some form of modular computing that offers computing on demand. Something where when you get home you plug your tablet into a dock that adds parallel processing, better graphics and functionality to the device.

That’s what MS is doing, they realized that they need to exceed the expectations of consumers by identifying iPads short coming and clear a product in production a year before iPad can’t account for all the problems iPad will face in the upcoming months. That is the time for MS to not just regurgitate but improve.