Ina Fried has a piece on CNET about Bill Gates early vision and evangelism for tablets going back to at least 2005. I clearly remember reading about this at the time and yet it failed to make an impression on me. Fried makes the point that the technology wasn’t quite there to offer a sub-$800 unit with sufficient battery life to take the market by storm as the iPad has seemed to do.

The iPad is perhaps the best-received new consumer gadget since the game-changing iPhone. The Origami effort, /* Project Origami was Microsoft’s tablet commercialization effort */ meanwhile, is a footnote, just one of many in a string of failures in the mobile market. And while the PC market is still fast growing and dominated by Microsoft, the company’s failures in the mobile market threaten Windows’ long-term future.

As Microsoft continues to struggle with new computing form factors such as smartphones and tablets, it might benefit from taking a look back at Origami. How exactly did Microsoft have such a keen grasp on the future and still let opportunity slip through its fingers?

For starters, Origami probably came too soon. Although Gates could see a time when computers had all-day battery life, small Windows machines were still lucky to get a couple hours of battery life. And it would be another couple of years before multitouch would arrive on both Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s Surface.

Microsoft also had a lot on its plate. It was in the process of developing Longhorn–a significant overhaul of Windows XP. Faced with challenges to create an all-new file system and other major changes, the company scaled back the project and created what became Vista. Vista, in addition its other well-documented shortcomings, had more intensive graphics that made Windows even less well suited to low-end hardware and more of a drain on battery life.