Everything comes back to Balmer's disdain for the iPad as being an overpriced netbook device that nobody will ever use.

MS is furiously trying to merge tablets into fully fledged PCs.

I can almost guarantee that by Windows 9 they will have some success with this, and hardware will get better and better.

But that's not to say the tablet space doesn't have enormous potential as reduced and simplified user experiences.

Microsoft is betting a lot of its chips on pushing full Windows onto smaller devices.

One key detail is that Office 365 seems to completely misjudge expectations of tablet computing.