Peter Fisk on the IBM experiment with the PC Jr:

My theory is that is was probably a deliberate strategy to stratify the marketplace into “gaming computers” for the home and “business computers” for the office. The keyboard design of the PC Jr guaranteed that it would never be used for either word processing or data entry, which were two markets that IBM dominated at the time.

Which leads to a Microsoft comparison:

My feeling is that they are following IBM’s defensive strategy from 20 years ago and that WPF/e is a marketing move, like the PC Jr., whose real purpose is to divide the marketplace. They are trying to engineer WPF/e so that it is good enough to be popular, but not good enough to be a threat to their established lines of business. Which explains why it is taking so long.

Peter has spent a long time playing in the WPF/.NET playground, so I think he's got a good perspective on this.

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