The Specter in the Room
In just the last week or two, Microsoft made it clear that its Surface Hub line is coming to an end. There will be no Surface Hub 4. Surface Hub 3 is the final chapter, with end-of-sale and end-of-life dates now on the board.
By the way, this is David Danto. I say that because sometimes the byline and the image get missed. We are looking into changing the “sender” of this Substack from Dave Michels to TalkingPointz. I would say this is the “smarter” David, but that may be just as confusing.
The end of the Surface Hub is a notable milestone in the collaboration industry. It was an important product. It changed expectations around what a front-of-room system could be. It helped normalize the idea that a meeting room display should be interactive, collaborative, and deeply tied to the platform people used every day, and it brought Microsoft squarely into the AV hardware space. In that sense, it absolutely mattered.
But when I think about Surface Hub, that is not the first thing that comes to mind.
What I remember most is the ghost.
The original Surface Hub was announced in January 2015 and did not begin shipping until mid 2016. More than a year is a very long time to cast a shadow over a market. During that time, Microsoft effectively told customers and competitors alike that the future of collaboration was coming, so maybe everybody should hold off on buying whatever was actually available.
That is a tactic the technology industry has used for years. Announce a product early enough, market it boldly enough, and it starts freezing the category long before there is a real product in real rooms. Buyers pause. Competitors get squeezed. Analysts and media spend months discussing potential instead of reality. By the time the thing actually arrives, it has already shaped the market.
That is not quite vaporware. Vaporware implies something fake, or something that never comes at all. What I am talking about here is a little different. Let’s call it a specter.
A specter may well become real, but long before it does, it hovers over the market like a ghost. It gets treated as inevitable. It gets touted as category-defining. And it messes up the market, because it’s very difficult to compete with a promise backed by a giant brand and amplified by months or years of expectation.
That is exactly what happened with Surface Hub.
And when Surface Hub finally came out, it proved something else important. A specter can become real and still be disappointing.
The first Surface Hub was revolutionary in some ways and terrible in others. It was forward-looking, ambitious, and influential. It also had significant flaws. It did not mesh especially well with Microsoft’s own platforms at the time. The camera placement was bad enough that if people were actually standing at the board and working, you often got terrible views of cheeks and side angles instead of anything useful. Some of the decisions felt like they had been made by people imagining AV and collaboration instead of watching it happen in the wild.
Even more frustrating was the attitude around it. At the time, Microsoft’s Surface Hub team was ultra-sensitive to criticism. Analysts and industry observers trying to offer constructive feedback were not always treated like people helping refine a first-generation category product. Too often, the response felt defensive, even hostile. Microsoft had created something bold, but the team behind it did not always welcome honest discussion about where it fell short.
That history matters because it reminds us not to confuse anticipation with achievement.
The longer a company talks about a future product, the bigger the legend can become. Expectations rise so high that by the time the product ships, in order to be considered a success, some users can expect it to cure loneliness, fix bad acoustics, simplify IT management, and probably go into the back room and lay golden eggs while it is at it.
Look at Google’s 3D video collaboration effort. It was introduced as Project Starline back in 2021. Since then, we have seen demos, concept conversations, secretive trade show appearances “behind a black curtain,” refinements, and lots of talk about how this would change remote communication forever. In 2025, it became Google Beam, and HP finally put real hardware around it as HP Dimension with Google Beam. That is progress, certainly. But it is still not a product being shipped into ordinary user offices. The only reason this specter has not frozen the video collaboration market is that enough of us are still around from the immersive telepresence hype cycle of twenty years ago to know this will be a fabulous experience that is also too limited and expensive for most practical use cases.
But let us be honest about what happened along the way. When the specter hovers intangibly for too long, it can backfire. Every event cycle that passed made it harder to take seriously and easier to mythologize. Each additional year of buildup increased the pressure on the eventual release. After that much anticipation, nobody expects just a good AV experience. They expect science fiction. They expect magic. They expect a product so extraordinary that it should practically be running the company’s quarterly earnings report by itself. In fact, the industry may need a new unit of measure for this sort of thing. When a specter lingers so long that it stops inspiring awe and starts inviting eye-rolls, that may be one full Starline.
That is the danger of the specter. The longer it lingers, the less room there is for reality.
And Google is hardly alone. The tech industry is full of products that were promoted far ahead of proof. Some never arrived. Some arrived years late. Some arrived and simply did not do what the narrative promised. The Humane AI Pin is a recent reminder that a product can generate huge curiosity and still fall flat when ordinary humans actually try to live with it. There have been plenty of other gadgets over the years that looked revolutionary in the concept video and underwhelming in the real world. The story is often better than the shipped unit.
All of this is why I do not object to previews, roadmaps, or early announcements in principle. Companies have every right to lean into fresh messaging and tell the market where they are headed. Customers want visibility. Partners want planning guidance. Analysts want to know what is coming. None of that is the problem.
The specter problem only starts when the future is marketed as though it has already been validated.
This is not just a story from the past. It is still happening. Earlier this year, Shure introduced its IntelliMix Bar Pro, and on paper, and in what we have seen at trade shows, it looks genuinely promising. Shure has a strong reputation, and the design appears to take a new, thoughtful approach to microphones, cameras, and room coverage for a videobar. It may turn out to be an excellent product. (I’ll let you know definitively – if I ever get my hands on one in my lab for proper testing.)
The caution is simply that the industry can sometimes get ahead of the evidence. Since the announcement, there has already been a good deal of advertising, attention, and enthusiasm around what this product could mean for the category. That may prove fully deserved. But until the product is actually available and independently tested in real-world conditions, buyers should treat the discussion as encouraging rather than conclusive. What happens next, whether inadvertently or intentionally, is that all of this early enthusiasm can start to raise red flags among analysts and observers. At some point, (one Starline?), the product risks looking less like an exciting new entry and more like another specter taking shape in the market…because hype without proof is one of the oldest tricks in technology.
And it works…at least for a while.
It works especially well when the company behind the product is large enough, respected enough, or loud enough to make buyers nervous about choosing anything else in the meantime. With the Surface Hub, other manufacturers had to compete not only with a Microsoft product, but with the idea of a Microsoft product. That is a much harder thing to fight. You cannot beat a ghost in a demo. You cannot benchmark it. You cannot point to failed installs or awkward workflows because the thing has not arrived yet. All you can do is watch the room get colder while the future is sold from a distance.
That is why the Surface Hub story is still relevant even as the line ends. Not because the product failed or succeeded. Not because it did not matter. But because it is a textbook example of how a specter can reshape a category before it has earned the right to do so. These days, that dynamic is often helped along by an unfortunately large number of influencers eager to praise products they have neither tried nor seem especially qualified to judge.
Sometimes the specter becomes a good product. Sometimes it becomes a flawed one. Sometimes it takes multiple generations to get there. Sometimes it never really lives up to the mythology. Sometimes we’re actually still waiting for it. But in every case, the market would be better served by remembering one simple rule: promise is not performance.
So as we head toward InfoComm in June and the next wave of launches, briefings, teasers, and demonstrations, that is the lens I am going to use. I want to know what is shipping. I want to know what works in ugly real rooms, with difficult users, bad lighting, echo problems, ordinary IT staff, and all the other messy realities that marketing decks never show. I want to know what survives contact with the real world.
Because the collaboration industry does not need more specters.
It needs more real solutions and less bragging about unavailable ones.
Insider Report Discussion
As we’ve mentioned before, paid subscribers to our insider report get critical, curated news about our industry every month. That very tangible benefit is no specter. Of course, you should subscribe, but if you’d like to know the top stories we covered for March, we discuss them in this video – well worth your time to watch to the end (as we discuss how to get a discounted subscription).
Up Next
Dave Michels is in Orlando (for the first time this year) to attend Microsoft M365. It was the SharePoint Conference community event that was renamed when Microsoft co-sponsored.
David Danto is at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference, which has drawn attention from the content-creation community (everyone’s now a broadcaster).
Dave and David will chat about what they saw on next Monday’s UC Weekly News podcast, the latest of which you can always find at tinyurl.com/UCWeeklyNews.
This was originally published via our Substack.