So.... I guess that was CES?

Does anyone else find it weird that 2019's big Consumer Electronics Show wasted the entire week without showcasing anything for actual consumers?

I mean, sure, we got LG's rollup OLED TV, which looks sexy but costs US$8000, and which will need to be replaced in two years' time because of OLED's severe screen burn-in issues. Who can afford to spend $8K every two years on a roll-up gimmick TV? Who is this for?

We also got a plethora of 8K TVs, at a time when even 4K TVs aren't really a thing yet. I mean, it's great that the likes of LG are making 4K sets that are comparable in price to 1080p sets; if you're needing to replace your TV, and don't need a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz for any reason, then you can certainly go 4K because it won't cost extra so why not? But you still don't need a 4K TV for which there's almost no content available, and you definitely don't need an expensive 8K set for which there's even less content on the menu. 8K is nothing but costly, boasting high price points while delivering zero value to the consumer... which was basically the prevailing trend of CES2019.

Oh, yes, and then there's 5G... which, again, boasts a premium price while being completely useless to consumers since there are no 5G networks. And, no, AT&T's 5G E nonsense is not a 5G network, and does not count. Which brings us to CES2019's other prevailing trend, which was straight-up lies told to consumers about expensive products which are being marketed at them, without being in any way designed for them.

Worse yet, the one big discussion about technology that consumers actually care about was never mentioned by any of the big exhibitors.

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.

Windows 10's spyware coming to XBox One

From The Guardian:

Microsoft has announced a new summer update for the Xbox One console, which will include support for the company’s digital personal assistant, Cortana, and will more closely align the console with Windows 10 PCs. A more unified online store will offer both PC and console titles, and Xbox One will also be able to support some Windows apps.

Microsoft is calling the Xbox One version of Cortana a “personal gaming assistant”. As on PC and smartphone, she is able to learn your current whereabouts and where your key locations are, so you’ll be able to ask it, while you’re playing a game at home, how long it’ll take you to get to work. Any information you request from Cortana will be displayed in a panel at the side of the main game screen.

To communicate, players simply have to say “hey Cortana” – a sentence that Microsoft claims is easier for the system to pick up than the old “Xbox” prompt. Players won’t need Kinect, as any Xbox One headset with a microphone will suffice. Players will also be able to ask Cortana what their friends are doing onXbox, and it’s possible to invite friends into a Party chat via Cortana voice controls.

Remember when Microsoft first announced the XBox One? It was going to come bundled with Kinect, which was going to be on all the time, would be constantly connected to the internet, and would constantly monitor the environment for any sound or motion that it could interpret as a command prompt. And people lost their shit:

Prior to Xbox One's launch, privacy concerns were raised over the new Kinect; critics showed concerns the device could be used for surveillance, stemming from the originally announced requirements that Xbox One's Kinect be plugged in at all times, plus the initial always-on DRM system that required the console to be connected to the internet to ensure continued functionality. Privacy advocates contended that the increased amount of data which could be collected with the new Kinect (such as a person's eye movements, heart rate, and mood) could be used for targeted advertising.

Reports also surfaced regarding recent Microsoft patents involving Kinect, such as a DRM system based on detecting the number of viewers in a room, and tracking viewing habits by awarding achievements for watching television programs and advertising. While Microsoft stated that its privacy policy "prohibit[s] the collection, storage, or use of Kinect data for the purpose of advertising", critics did not rule out the possibility that these policies could be changed prior to the release of the console.

Concerns were also raised that the device could also record conversations, as its microphone remains active at all times.

So, fast forward to 2016, and Microsoft are now replicating one of the most unwelcome and problematic features of its XBox One platform, using Windows 10's Cortana, which is also causing privacy concerns:

In order to work, Cortana logs your voice (to process what you’re saying), location (to give you location-specific answers), your writing (to answer questions), your contacts (so you can reference them), calendar events (so it can create, delete, or give information about your upcoming appointments), and more. That’s a lot of stuff!

[...]

This, coupled with the “Send Microsoft info about how I write” setting mentioned earlier, is the biggest privacy concern in Windows 10, primarily because the language is so vague. The “Getting to Know You” setting does not specify where or when it can collect, say, “typing history”, which is troubling.

What could possibly go wrong? It's not like Cortana is locked to Bing, and uses a web service to perform all searches, even searches of your local files... except, of course, that Cortana does exactly that.

It remains to be seen if this causes the same kind of crapstorm among XBOne customers that GWX is causing among Win7 PC users. Gamers, generally, appear to more accepting of Win10 and its crap, and console gamers, in particular, might not be sufficiently well-informed to know about the potential problems here. No idea if Spybot Anti-Beacon will work on XBOnes, either.

No, consumers really didn't like the Kinect

I just read this bit of revisionist history on HuffPost Tech, courtesy of Reuters:

Consumers liked Kinect, but it never lived up to its full potential, in part because it spawned no blockbuster games. Microsoft failed to persuade top gaming studios to invest seriously in Kinect, developers say, and by 2014 it was no longer being included with Xbox consoles.

That's a lovely story. Just one problem... that's not what happened.

Critics and reviewers liked the Kinect, yes. Some of them even liked the XBox One version, which was on all the time and reporting what it saw and heard back to Microsoft even when your XBOne was "off," praising it's camera quality and fast response time, among other things. But consumers didn't take to the Kinect, either on the XB360 or the XBOne. That's why the AAA studios weren't making games for the thing... there were no users to whom they could've sold those games, even if they'd made some.

That may have been partly why Microsoft were so keen to bundle the Kinect with the XBOne, back when they were still selling XBOne as the device which was going to take over your living room, and control all your devices, while downplaying games as the main use of the device... a disastrous marketing strategy which Sony capitalised on, allowing them to clean XBox's clock in this console generation, outselling them two to one.

It certainly didn't help, though, that Kinect on XBOne had other issues besides a near-total lack of games that made use of the thing:

Prior to Xbox One's launch, privacy concerns were raised over the new Kinect; critics showed concerns the device could be used for surveillance, stemming from the originally announced requirements that Xbox One's Kinect be plugged in at all times, plus the initial always-on DRM system that required the console to be connected to the internet to ensure continued functionality. Privacy advocates contended that the increased amount of data which could be collected with the new Kinect (such as a person's eye movements, heart rate, and mood) could be used for targeted advertising.

Reports also surfaced regarding recent Microsoft patents involving Kinect, such as a DRM system based on detecting the number of viewers in a room, and tracking viewing habits by awarding achievements for watching television programs and advertising. While Microsoft stated that its privacy policy "prohibit[s] the collection, storage, or use of Kinect data for the purpose of advertising", critics did not rule out the possibility that these policies could be changed prior to the release of the console.

Concerns were also raised that the device could also record conversations, as its microphone remains active at all times. In response to the criticism, a Microsoft spokesperson stated that users are "in control of when Kinect sensing is On, Off or Paused", will be provided with key privacy information and settings during the console's initial setup, and that user-generated content such as photos and videos "will not leave your Xbox One without your explicit permission."[19][20][21][22] Microsoft ultimately decided to reverse its decision to require Kinect usage on Xbox One, but the console still shipped with the device upon its launch in November 2013.[9]

The decision to still ship XBOne with Kinect added $150 to the price tag, for a device that consumers had never taken to, and which now came with a freight of Orwellian PR, a combination which sunk the platform; Microsoft would eventually backtrack on their claim that Kinect was "essential" to the XBOne experience, and ship a SKU with no Kinect in the box, but the damage was done: PlayStation 4 was already well ahead, and Microsoft would never get close to Sony again in console unit sales.

And yet, Reuters is still claiming that consumers "liked Kinect," in spite of the fact that Microsoft has released it twice, only to have consumers refuse, en masse, to buy the thing. No. Just.... no.