Microsoft has announced that the company’s upcoming operating system, Window’s 7 will offer a touch screen feature as an alternative to using your mouse.

Chairman, Bill Gates and CEO, Steve Ballmer showed off a little of what we can expect to see with Windows 7 at The Wall Street Journal’s D : All Things Digital conference.

Bill Gates said that while the keyboard and mouse are important today, in years to come the potential for other methods would be huge.

"We’re at an interesting juncture where almost all the interaction is with the computer and mouse, today, and, over the years to come, the role of speech, vision, ink, all of those will become huge,”

The demo was kicked off when Ballmer and Gates were asked whether or not they thought Vista was a failure. Ballmer and Gates both said that while there were things they would change going forward, they were adamant that it was not a mistake.

“It’s not a failure, it’s not a mistake. Are there things we’ll modify and improve going forward ? Sure," said Ballmer.

Bill Gates was quoted as saying, "There’s no product that we’ve ever shipped that was 100% of what I wanted. That’s part of the magic of software, people give you feedback... and you get to make a new version. ... We have a culture of ’we need to do better."

They then showed some footage of the touch screen function in action. iPhone and iPod touch users will see something similar to what they’re used to with the ability to enlarge and shrink photos on screen.

They also showed off Touchable Paint, or what we like to call, HighTech Finger Painting and software to navigate maps using your fingers.

Microsoft has said it expected to release it’s latest OS around three years after the January 2007 release of Windows Vista, which puts it at a late 2009 release.