I sent my crystal ball back to the shop last night because it’s obviously not working right. Yesterday I confidently predicted that Microsoft’s big tablet announcement would be an extension of the Xbox Live platform positioned to compete with the Kindle Fire rather than a straight-on iPad competitor, only to have Microsoft make a monkey of me (and a lot of other people) by announcing a straight-on iPad competitor. Apart from the surprise of Microsoft’s apparently sudden shift in strategy, there were a lot of odd things about yesterday’s announcement, like why it was in Los Angeles and why it seemed to be so hastily put together. Perhaps Microsoft was unimpressed with what it saw from its OEM partners at Computex earlier this month and decided it needed to show them how to build a proper Windows 8/RT mobile device.