Any more touchy, and these mice could turn into French chefs!

It's no secret that Microsoft hires the best tech researchers out there by the truckloads, and quite possibly, has a research lab with an intellectual and creative heft that could compare with the legends of yore -- IBM's Watson, AT&T's Bell Labs, and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Of course, it still continues to dish out stinkware such as Windows Vista, but that despite the efforts of its brains trust, much of whose work likely never sees the light of day. Perhaps in response to Apple's recent leak of a touch sensitive mouse, Microsoft has released a video of five different types of touch-oriented mice. The demo is really, really neat. I'd love to own one or more of those toys, just to play around.

In the grand scheme of things, mice-like tools really belong to a paradigm that's showing it's age; after all, the great St. Doug Engelbart (may his tribe increase) invented the first mouse in the 1960's. Maybe this is the mouse's dying gasp, its last hurrah. If so, what a wonderful hurrah it is. I hope Microsoft sees it fit to release some of their touchy rodents into the wild; who knows what genetic transformations could emerge from such an experiment?