Is Microsoft's "Home Hub" doomed before even being released?

I hadn't thought much about Microsoft's "Home Hub" announcement. In a bid to regain ground already lost to Amazons' Echo and Alexa devices, the device is basically a PC peripheral that replicates some of the Big Brother-ish behaviour that Microsoft had removed from the XBox One, constantly listening to everything you say, and pouncing when you say something that it's pre-programmed to respond to.

The idea seems to be that PC users who are already leery of Windows 10's approach to privacy issues will jump at the chance to actually have their PC actively listening to everything they say, while still beaming unspecified data to unspecified locations to be shared with unspecified 3rd parties for non-specific purposes. Have I mentioned latently that Cortana uses a web service to conduct all searches, even if you're only searching for files on your local hard drive?

So, I wasn't particularly impressed by Home Hub... and apparently I wasn't the only one.

From BRG.com:

According to the report, Microsoft thinks Home Hub PCs will be the center of the family, with a special new “family account” that anyone can log into. It’s meant to live on a kitchen counter or somewhere convenient, so everyone will use it as a replacement for a family calendar or to-do notes on the fridge.

It’s a nice idea, but I almost guarantee it will fail for a list of reasons. Specifically:

• Desktop PCs are already dying as everyone moves to laptops. No family wants to spend hundreds of dollars on a Windows PC that’s a replacement for $5 of fridge magnets.
• Microsoft apparently envisages its hardware partners building “Home Hub PCs.” These will probably look like glorified all-in-ones with small screens and cute, colorful plastic cases. They’ll also cost a minimum of $300, which is a hard sell when the cheapest Echo hardware is $30.
• People don’t want a PC sitting in their kitchen. Amazon Echo and Google Home are designed to look like unobtrusive Bluetooth speakers for a reason: having a gigantic touchscreen gadget sitting on your kitchen counter is not good interior design.
• The magic of Alexa and the Google Assistant is the deep integration into your music services and smart home. If people want calendar appointments, they’ll probably ask the assistant on their phone.

All these reasons also assume that Microsoft manages to deliver this product on time, without a bunch of strange bugs, and before the trend for in-home personal assistants has been wiped out by brain implants or something. Let’s just hope that Home Hub is an optional software upgrade, for once.

Ouch. Hard to argue with any of that assessment, though.

Microsoft have spent most of their history as a software company, rather than a hardware company, and their only hardware devices are the XBox line... the latest installment of which is in a distant third place (behind PC and PS4) in the current "console" generation. Now, suddenly, they want to be Apple (Steve Jobs' Apple, that is, not Tim Cook's Apple). I can understand why they'd want to replicate Steve Jobs' feats of consumer electronics dominance, but I'm not at all convinced that they have enough hardware savvy to make it work.