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Microsoft Is Planning To Turn Windows 10 PCs Into Amazon Echo Competitors (theverge.com)
Speaking of Amazon's Echo devices, it appears Microsoft also wants a slice of this nascent market. The Verge's Tom Warren claims that Microsoft has been working on a feature for Windows 10 that would allow it "to better compete with devices like Amazon's Echo." Dubbed HomeHub, the feature is designed to create "a family environment for a PC with shared access to calendars, apps, and even a new welcome screen." He adds: Microsoft is even planning to support smart home devices like Philips' Hue lights, to enable Windows 10 to act as a hub to control and manage smart home hardware. While we've heard about HomeHub before, The Verge has obtained internal concepts of exactly how Microsoft is imagining HomeHub will work. The major addition is a new welcome screen that includes an "always on" digital corkboard to let families use to-do lists, calendars, and notes. The welcome screen is really designed for kitchen PCs and new smaller hardware with screens that will support Cortana voice commands from across the room.
It has ever been thus. You gain more market share by having features, even if they are hard to use or broken. If your competitors have better sounding features than you do then customers will go there. There is little point in having a perfect system if no one uses it. So if MS has developer hours they are best spent adding new stuff than fixing things that don't quite work properly.
The difference in mindset is: geek vs marketing.
Hey Microsoft, have you learned nothing from Windows 8? NOBODY WANTS A WELCOME SCREEN!
that would be hard to do without a computer. Now more and more computers become a tool that trades in minimal help on trivial tasks against all your data, freedom and privacy.
Pity the people who fall for such.