Windows Touch-screen? Oh, Lord Help Us...

This is the company that has been sure the tablet PC would be a success since 1999. It's never been more than a computing niche. Yeah, touch-screen makes sense on something you hold in your hand, like an iPhone or Treo. But not-so-much with something that sits on your desk.

It would be one thing if we could trust that Microsoft will pull off adding touch-screen to Windows in an elegant, savvy way. But we have no such trust in Microsoft. It adds features the way Louis XIV decorated Versailles. Vista is so full of gunk, it eats up a typical computer's resources and crashes more often than XP ever did.

At the conference where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked up the touch-screen technology, he responded to Vista criticism by, essentially, blaming his customers' inability to adjust. "When you read the customer research, the No. 1 people found jarring is that we changed the user interface," Ballmer said. "People take a while to get used to it."

Sorry, but no. The user interface was never the problem. Slow, bloated, buggy software that is incompatible with a lot of existing applications -- that's been the problem.