Brand Lock-In Has Been Microsoft's Achilles Heel

In the late summer of 1999 in a conference room on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA, five people including Todd and myself got our first look at the new Pocket PC that Microsoft was going to announce to the world later that year. To say the least, we were very disappointed by what we saw. We all were hoping that Microsoft would overhaul the user interface of the current Palm-size PC to match what Palm had, an interface that enabled one to operate the device with as few taps of the screen as possible, like presenting application icons on a home screen so that apps could be launched with one tap.