As someone who officially became a desktop OS interface nerd while playing with Dynapad (<a href="http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab/dynapad.htm" rel="nofollow">http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab/dynapad.htm</a>), it frustrates me how risk averse the big OS vendors are. They have all the market share, infrastructure, marketing, and engineering talent to pull of something really incredible, but they opt not to do so.<p>I understand that they don't want to disrupt their user base with something too radical. That makes sense to me. However, with the next version of Windows, <i>Microsoft had nothing to lose</i>. Everyone hated Vista and most people avoided upgrading to it. Why not treat this failure as a huge opportunity to do something new and interesting?<p>They could have pushed the state of the art of desktop operating systems way forward, and possibly taken away that smug feeling of superiority us Mac users have enjoyed for years. Instead they just polished up a subset of Vista's warts. Oh well.