Mary Jo: All FUD aside, the Tablet PC is alive and well , Microsoft and the development community have shown nothing but iuncreased commitment to the platform, and there are more OEMs and more models than ever. While it's clear you are not a Tablet PC fan, constantly predicting its demise is just plain silly. And obfuscating the fact that Tablet functionality is being incorporated into the mainstream Windows experience by making the accurate but misleading statement that Microsoft is "killing" the Tablet PC OS SKU is simply the latest example of this prejudice. Why not state that Tablet functionality is avaialble in all versions of Vista? That's every bit as accurate as your death sentence statement.

First of all, you have to understand that Mary Jo is very anti-tablet. If you have read any of her columns the past several years in terms of tablet pcs, you’ll know what I’m talking about. She relishes any opportunity to declare the tablet pc dead. I’m writing about this so folks don’t get mislead by her statement. Second, Microsoft isn’t killing the tablet functionality in Vista. Tablet functionality is alive and well and soooo much better in Vista than it ever was in XP. It just isn’t a seperate sku any longer. It is built in with Vista. With a proper understanding of where Microsoft is going mobile wise, she wouldn’t make such a statement in that way. That statement is so misleading, it isn’t even funny. It makes me wonder if Mary Jo has even seen a tablet pc running Vista. By saying “an odd time for Redmond to be touting the Tablet, yet again”, she infers that tablet functionality is dead in Vista and dead in the marketplace, and that just isn’t so.Post a clarification, Mary Jo. Rob Bushwaywww.GottaBeMobile.com

As one of my readers suggested quite aptly, Microsoft is killing off the Tablet PC in the same way it is killing of Media Center.