PCWorld has a nice story from CES called The UMPC: Still Evolving! Still Pointless! Why? Because Windows running on a pocketable device means a small screen and tiny keyboard. How can you treat that like a PC?

The answer, of course, is you don't. This was Microsoft's early attempt to outflank PDAs and smart phones and the Blackberry. You know, all those devices mobile professionals carry to read information provided by others. That's what all the big companies want: users to read and buy content, not create content themselves. Then the Internet ruined that idea, as users flocked to blogs and YouTube and everywhere else they could post their own content.

These devices always remind me of an old Dilbert cartoon, where poor Dilbert is being accosted by a user (yet again). The user, a product manager, wants a device with a 45 inch display screen that fits inside her purse. Unless Dilbert can rework the physical laws of the universe, that can't be done.

So why are Microsoft and other companies pushing UMPCs on us? This serves other purposes, such as servers to connect and feed data to the UMPCs. Also, very few new products became hits immediately. Maybe version three, or three hundred, will be the winner. And Microsoft has the money and patience to keep going until version three thousand if they want.