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Comment by tdicola | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to know why companies even waste time making videos like these anymore. Looking back at past stuff (like the 'smart home' from Microsoft in the mid 90's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V_0xDUg0h0) it's pretty hilarious how out of touch they are with reality.

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That video seemed incredibly prescient. A lot of the features in the video are a couple years off from mass adoption, and maybe it's a bit more geared towards the 90s mindset, but there's a current day equivalent to most of the functionality.

Well for whatever reason it certainly didn't help MS in the long run to produce that video. They missed the technology that actually mattered like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and are still scrambling to catch up to everyone.

Actually we have no idea whether it helped or not. It may have helped a lot, just that there were too many other forces fighting against it. I'd imagine a video like this could serve as something to get the employees talking (even if they bash it).

Science fiction authors change the world with ideas (having ideas of how the world could be). Visualising/putting-in-words what you think the future could look like contributes to what the future will look like. I guess companies know about this and want to get ahead of the curve.

Think of how expensive all that stuff would be. And all the maintenance of learning it, upgrading it, and powering it...

And for what, really? There's a reason video phones are not used today: it's unnecessary waste (in time and bandwidth) -- and also privacy violating -- when a text message will do just fine.

Skype and facetime get used a lot for video chat, though.

Not when you just want to say five words to someone. It is certainly not anyone's primary means of electronic communication.

It depends on the person.

I don't use video calls much, but my younger daughter considers video calls to be the default.

Really? That kind of looks like 2015 to me.

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