Progress. ISA was a compromise for a long time. Find a modern board with an ISA bus slot on it today. But for a long time, there were always one or two of them on there - and I bet you can still find a motherboard that supports ISA if you *really* need one. But progress said ISA was going to become less important than it had been for the first 15 or 20 years of the Intel Architecture IBM PC Clone market.

And that market for third party accessories that enhance the PC experience is what makes the PC such a market force. Something changes, and suddenly USB cables or HDMI cables or wireless routers are all the rage. The tremendous flexibility of PCs means if you don't have a need for HDMI, you can still use d-sub 15 VGA connectors. No harm there. But if you want HDMI - that is an option too. That is exactly what is happening here. You've got your DESKTOP... but you haven't LOST your start menu - it has moved and morphed - but having two would have been redundant and a waste of resources. Progress says throw it out.

Oh... and lots of people wailed and gnashed their teeth when Windows became a true 32 bit OS with a DOS shell - instead of a GUI shell riding on top of DOS. "It is going to RUIN DOS gaming! Who wants to run games with the overhead of a whole GUI taking up valuable resources?!?" and my personal favorite, "This will probably kill DOS as a gaming platform and drive all the gamers to Linux!" (hahahahahaha....... ooooohh... that last one is so funny it hurts...)

Listen - maybe you're content and this is the end of the road for you with PCs and you'll ride it out into retirement on Windows 7. You can do that - there isn't anything *wrong* with it. But my point is the people who feel like you - ultimately they're in unique positions and they're going to be the minority. This is coming - and the missing start menu, hopefully Microsoft holds to their guns on it - because their logic for removing it is *sound* and it will speed adoption, not slow it. I'm not trying to convert you so much as make you understand that for people who want to move *forward* with PC platforms - it is all going to start going this way... including Linux. There might be a *better* way to transition it and maybe Ubuntu will deliver that and we'll finally have the year of Linux on the Desktop... but this touch-centric interface shift is not going to go away - and Microsoft has done a great job of bridging the translation while still taking care of the legacy users and hardware.