That's not say that there aren't a lot of things that one can do much more quickly with the iPhone (e.g. maps and surfing the web), or that these don't tend to make it more useful...though I don't find the touch keyboards quite as fluid for writing as Graffiti under Palm OS (hardware phone keyboards being another matter).
Comparatively, Microsoft's PocketPC PDAs of the time took many steps backwards from the Visor in the quality of the user experience. That's despite a multiple-times CPU power and RAM advantage over the Visor. I remember being dumbfounded at that. Putting out PocketPC OS that is less enjoyable to use than a Handspring Visor--that's not innovation.
Sure, Microsoft broke some new ground with .NET and CLR and C#. Sure, their Visual Studio toolchain got way better--after the competition from Eclipse and IntelliJ. Sure, their C++ compiler standards support got better--after GCC began lighting a fire up underneath MSVC (you could do just enough with GCC and mingw to displace MSVC in plenty of situations).
You can clearly see the "Windows must be everywhere" idea stunting Microsoft's growth. The problem is that the PARC UI sucks. Windows sucks. Mac OS X sucks. It sucks for the uninitiated computer user, who can't imagine what the hell "windows" are on the screen. Why are there thin bands of things that must be clicked on and some path followed (menus). Why did suddenly clicking in one place made the web page disappear (accidental click on a background app brings it forward). The modern operating systems are STILL a fucking minefield, waiting for you, dumb computer illiterate user, to make that unlucky key press or a click that loses hours of your work.
Microsoft has (or at least had) no intention of recognizing that and addressing it. Microsoft, having penetrated almost the entire tech industry and all the personal tech markets that were willing to put up with Windows, rested on its laurels. Microsoft's improvements were all narrow-sighted and thus only capable of giving up small gains in the market. That's not innovation, that's incrementalism.
This is why Apple's iPad is whipping the llama's ass. It's the uncomputer computer. There's no windows. There's no chrome or close buttons or colored bubbles. There's just the one thing you're working with on the screen. People have been waiting for this shit since the first time they had to swap floppies between drives A: and B:.
It's amazing to me that enough other companies haven't figured this out yet. Apple is eating the competition because the competition has their heads up their ass. The competition needs to step away from geekdom and design something fresh. We will have a true Apple competitor (don't know how soon--I say 4 years), and when that competitor comes, it will be blindingly obvious why nobody can compete today. It's the TRUST in a quality, unpunishing TOTAL user experience. It's fucking everything. It's the A to the Z. TRUST in that exploring won't rake you over the coals, but will be rewarding. TRUST builds the kind of loyalty that gets the people to stay and pay premium.
* The difference between Macintosh 1984 and the Alto is bigger than the difference between before and after Ribbon. The difference between Macintosh 1984 and Macintosh 2012 even more so, to say nothing of the gap between Macintosh and iOS. Microsoft almost always followed Apple's lead in UI design though.
* Kinect is a game controller. There's no Kinect UI paradigm yet, certainly not the way multitouch is a UI paradigm over capacitive touchscreens. Again, the gap between mouse and Macintosh is at least as big as the gap between capacitive touchscreen and iPhone.