Dell working without Windows.

What Dell is really doing here is building the equivalent of a secondary Asus Eee PC into a full-featured, full-size laptop. The Latitude On feature uses a low-power Intel ARM processor, flash storage and Linux (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10) separate from the laptop's main CPU, hard drive and Windows operating system. But unlike a subnotebook, the Latitude On system won't allow you to install applications. It's essentially a "cloud computing" device that depends on the Internet for much of its functionality.

ON's custom Web browser is based on Firefox. E-mail, "diary" and contacts are, of course, non-Microsoft applications. But some Microsoft data types are supported in one way or another. The system, for example, includes viewers for Microsoft Office documents (as well as for Adobe PDF documents). The built-in organizer grabs the 100 most recent Outlook e-mail messages from the laptop's cache and displays them.

From a Microsoft perspective, Latitude ON represents a debacle comparable to the UMPC disaster. Microsoft led a big push to drive sales of Vista -based Ultra-Mobile PCs, all of which failed catastrophically in the market, rejected by users in favor of first Linux-, then XP-based subnotebooks.

Now, it's happening again. Remember Windows Vista Sideshow? The feature was part of a broader effort by Microsoft to provide basic functionality on laptops while the main Windows OS was in sleep mode. A tiny screen on the lid would display the UI. Obviously that failed, and now partner Dell is delivering roughly similar but vastly superior functionality using Linux and other non-Microsoft software.

Based on all the information released so far, there is literally no downside (other than marginal additional cost).

The usefulness of these technologies stands in stark contrast to Microsoft Windows' ongoing slumber. When is the last time Microsoft rolled out something that boosted mobility the way these new features do?

The "old Microsoft" would have never allowed all this. The company would have leveraged its multi-billion dollar labs to figure all this out first, then, coerced Intel, Dell and the rest of the industry into supporting it. Now, Microsoft is on the sidelines while its closest partners innovate using companies that compete with Microsoft in the software marketplace.

When will Microsoft itself wake up from "sleep mode"?