And you can find a few other things that go back three or four years; Acer had one, for instance. None of them seem to have quite stuck the landing yet. But I don't say this because I lack faith in the idea; I think it's inevitable. It's just that these things all seem to be ahead of the market. Now we just have to wait for the market to realize it wants this.

(It's hard to read the market's mind. But every once in a while, you can guess where it's going to go in advance... and get yourself brutally murdered in your financials when you show up to the party years before the money shows up.)

Back on the topic of the original article, it's possible this is Microsoft's core strategic play... if they agree with me that this is inevitable, they've still got the income and the OS resources to stick out the market's slowness, and build an incredible offering on this front out with all their resources. It's at least possible that they could indeed unseat an incumbent Android/Apple duopoly if they can be that much better than the competition once this use case becomes big... and it's not hard to imagine it going down that way. They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.