The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet over at CNET News. Really interesting look at the inside of how Microsoft works and thinks.
Here's what I said about it two years ago.
Of course, it looks awesome and the video shows it working perfectly for that example, but remember how the demos for tablet computers and the UMPCs that MS was all about a couple of years ago looked, awesome, yet that buzz kinda died. If they can pull it off though, and if it works in real life as well as it does for the very narrow use case in the video, hell, I'm all over it :)
And a year later when they finally killed it:
Well, turns out (again, shockingly) that the system was just a video of technology that doesn't exist, and may or may not have parts of it appear in future products. Ironically the Courier was cited a few times in the past months as "the iPad killer". Uh huh.Bummer, as it looked very cool. Of course, something that cool (especially from Microsoft) is indistinguishable from a tech demo concept video.