"Kill your darlings," Faulkner once recommended to writers, and the same thing goes for tech: no matter how much sentimental attachment a company might have to a particular legacy application, at some point that application's going to have roughly as much relevance to the modern world as the '58 Edsel. Given how fast tech moves these days, that period from 'relevance' to 'dustbin' could be a matter of weeks.

Pressured by a global recession and a need to reinvigorate its product lines, Microsoft spent much of its 2009 killing its darlings with the speed and efficiency of Jack Bauer on a six-pack of Red Bull: not only dustbin-of-history apps like Encarta, but also a number of going-nowhere research projects. That was a good and necessary thing, especially considering the company's retooled strategy to focus around flagship products like Windows 7. But here we are, in 2010, and Microsoft just made a mistake.

They killed the Courier tablet.

At least in prototype form, the Courier was composed of two touch screens that folded on a central hinge, like a good old-fashioned book, and allowed users to scribble notes or drawings longhand via a stylus. If the videos that leaked over the past few months onto tech blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo were any indication, Courier could do everything from e-reading to image-taking to storing Web clippings. It was a notebook in the purest sense.

But then Microsoft decided to eliminate it with extreme prejudice.

"At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, and incubated. It's in Microsoft's DNA to continually develop and incubate new technologies to foster productivity and creativity," Frank Shaw, Microsoft's corporate vice president of communications, wrote in a statement that's been circulating online. "The Courier project is an example of this type of effort and its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings."

Bad move, especially since I haven't heard rumor of any other tablet products in the Redmond pipeline, "future Microsoft offerings" or no.

Lots of vaporware projects die every quarter, unwept and forgotten, but the Courier had potential. It had some innovative ideas. More to the point, it would have introduced another competitor to the Apple iPad--and that's not to say that the Courier could have wrecked Steve Jobs' newest wonder toy, but simply that it could have presented an alternative to the Apple ecosystem. (Full disclosure: most of my devices--not to mention the bulk of my music and all of the video/TV shows on my hard drive--are tethered in some way to Apple, and have been for the past several years.)

With rumors abounding that Hewlett-Packard will abandon its "slate" tablet PC (at least according to TechCrunch), that leaves Google and maybe HP's newly purchased Palm webOS to provide a viable Apple alternative. If tablet PCs are indeed the coming thing, then Microsoft's looking to be left behind at the starting gate.