Microsoft’s 7 does away with the mouse. Not quite sure if they can do away with the keyboard quite just yet, but the OS will have touch built right in, to launch programs, to run programs, and more. Perhaps they’ll even have some haptic technology built in. It’s a gigantic new world for developers to explore and build, a challenging one, to be sure, but this is only a glimpse of what the future holds. Sure it’ll be expensive to do this kind of research and development – Microsoft is one of the few corporations that has the money and talent to make this work.

As for Google’s Android software, it makes use of a lot of touch and movement, much like what the iPhone uses, only it offers a lot more possibility. For example, scrolling maps and webpages alike will just have you panning your phone to read. Google’s betting that customers who stay connected – wirelessly – will earn them more than enough to pay for the development of this technology.

After all this, we worry, will people 100 years down the road be able to differentiate from human-to-human touch vs human-to-machine touch ?