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There are a lot of comparisons here which don't make any sense. It's not the same people making HoloLens work (which may be overblown, since not many people hav
by mathw 9y ago
There are a lot of comparisons here which don't make any sense. It's not the same people making HoloLens work (which may be overblown, since not many people have had heads-on time with one to report back) and making Skype so awful, because Microsoft is huge and have different teams doing different things and some of those teams are clearly better than others or get their priorities set by people more in line with what the author would want than others.
Likewise at Google, Hangouts and self-driving cars won't share any people. Especially as their self-driving cars are now handled by a different company, Waymo, who have the same parent company as Google.
I get the point that it's astonishing that videoconferencing tech is still so awful. I remember interviewing at Google's London office years ago and two of the interviews were done by video links, and they worked flawlessly - but this very impressive conference system was one Google had bought in from somewhere and presumably paid ridiculous sums of money for. That experience gave me hope for consumer video tech - but it's now ten years later and where are we?
FaceTime seems to work, but it only works between Apple devices. Google Duo seems to work in my limited experimentation, but only works between phones running the Duo app, because Google have more hands that don't know what any of the other hands are doing than just about anybody else - especially in the consumer communications arena.
I wish someone would get their pants on and seriously invest in sorting out video calling.
Heck, getting audio to work reliably would be good. Best one for that currently in my experience? Slack.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoThough fairly decent, FaceTime gets shaky with what seems like just slightly sub-optimal network conditions.
- mulletbum 9y agoI would like to add to the first part of your comment that it seems lots of people don't understand how teams in a company work as well. You can't pull people off the HoloLens team and expect them to make huge leaps on the Skype team. If someone is in love with their HoloLens work, drive that forward, they might not be in love with Skype. Thus you have situations where new breakthroughs are hard to come by. I would think working on Skype is not nearly as exciting as HoloLens. #1 because I am sure Microsoft has to be insanely protective of the platform and not make large changes all at once. Not the case with HoloLens.
- imron 9y agoWhat you can do however is say to the hololens team that one of their priorities is to have a killer avatar based augmented reality video-conferencing app and that it's going to be one of the core drivers of the product so they better make sure it works and works well. It doesn't need to be built on Skype (and preferably wouldn't), but they should be looking at that as a core market for the product. A few months back I was talking to a friend, whose company was paying him to fly to the UK to host a week of training or something similar, and we calculated that the cost of flying and accommodating him for the week would have been equivalent to purchasing PCs and VR gear for all participants. Except of course there wasn't really any software up to the task of virtual conferencing.
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoI wish someone would get their pants on and seriously invest in sorting out video calling. It's not going to be sorted out...probably ever IMO. To do teleconferencing right you need to metaphorically impedance match between two users at ever increasing bitrate demand. So if one side has 3G and the other side is on Fiber - you have an impedance mismatch and an asymmetric experience. Until the floor for internet is basically what users would define as delivering "excellent" video calling - it's never going to be solved. Watch out for those moving goalposts though.