5 ms·

Microsoft is "early" to VR because it was already a player in VR and has very long been "early". Microsoft has been investing in AR/MR/VR research since before

Microsoft is "early" to VR because it was already a player in VR and has very long been "early". Microsoft has been investing in AR/MR/VR research since before the original Surface, not the tablet one but the giant table that got rebranded and then sold off, and since before the original Kinect. Microsoft is still making plenty of HoloLens devices (some on huge contracts) despite them not being "sexy". Windows 10 has had AR/MR/VR apps bundled for a long time despite most users never using them. It's hard for it to be a "full circle" when for the most part it looks like a straight line. The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own.

karmakaze 4y ago
Initially I thought MS might have learned from missing out on mobile to get ahead in AR/MR/VR and be a device and platform leader. It seems what they learned is to give up before entering and focus on partnering instead. That is something they've always succeeded at PC+DOS, IBM+WindowsNT, Apple+Office, JavaVM. To me it does seem a low target to aim for. VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone, Edge browser, etc. I suppose I could call that corporate self-awareness.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Here specifically too: Microsoft has such a weird lead in AR/MR/VR and have mostly just been sitting on it. For example, because of early Kinect work, they own the patents that would have made Meta's weird journey between "no legs" to "everyone gets legs if they want them! excitement!" irrelevant or much faster had the partnership happened sooner. They built the first "metaverse cloud" on Azure and they've used it and they've made something as exciting in theory as the HoloLens boring Enterprise products. The other possible takeaway is that after Windows Phone, Microsoft really has been truly risk adverse when it comes to consumer products, even in areas where they had a lead and could have delivered something no one else could. > VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone Windows Phone was arguably very well executed at the software level. Microsoft's troubles with Windows Phone were at the hardware levels and (worse) the economic levels where the phone carriers had already decided they prefer a duopoly and selling three things is one too many things to sell.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Windows Phone was bad executed at development experience level, with the WinRT, UAP, UWP enforced rewrites.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      We've had this argument more than once and I still disagree with that take. I took a .NET application through those transitions and there was never a "from scratch rewrite" step at any point. A lot of cheese moved and there was sometimes quite a bit of XAML shifts to meet new UI expectations, but most of the business logic code stayed the same or barely changed. On the other side, I've seen Apple enforce equal or worse "enforced" rewrites between major iOS versions with not even a fraction of the complaints Microsoft got across those product versions. (I had more inconvenience moving apps back and forth between WPF and Silverlight in some of the years prior, and even those moves were never from-scratch rewrites. Admittedly that may have left me with more skills to handle XAML changes and write to lowest common denominator XAML, so I am aware of my biases.) I realize you aren't ever going to agree with me on this, and I don't expect you to. I do think it is still useful for other people to see that there are counter-opinions here.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Apple can get away with a lot more given its dominant market position (esp. when it comes to delivering paying customers to app authors). But when you're the new scrappy contender with minimal market share, so you need the devs to make apps for your store rather than the other way around, it better be smooth sailing all around.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        A rewrite is a rewrite, even if only one line changes. Not going to bother to list everything that changed, it is public available for anyone to judge.
      - karmakaze 4y ago
        The difference of course is that iOS already has enough adoption to get away with this. Windows Phone and Windows UI development forked for no good reason while keeping very similar names and structures while trying to get initial adoption. It was clearly a mistake at that stage. I personally looked into the tech and as soon as I saw how fragmented it was realized MS didn't have a good plan and didn't venture developing for it.
sho_hn 4y ago
That's not the point of the title. The point of the article (and their coverage of MS for years) is that Microsoft used to be all about Windows: An operating system that abstracts hardware and enables first- and third-party apps. And now they making themselves about a system that abstracts hardware and runs apps again, but across a spectrum of devices and front-to-back. The common element is now the user and their account, not the single PC it runs on. I also think it's obvious, but then salient things are. Consumers today don't decide between PC vendors and operating systems, but between entire company-branded computing ecosystems. Are you on the Google or Apple or Amazon train? Things Stratechery doesn't discuss enough and this article is poor about: - Unlike in the Windows days, in the new competing-ecosystems world, geopolitics plays a much grander role. Everyone used to be on Windows, not everyone is on Google. China, Korea, Russia all have their own ecosystem juggernauts. In our globally interconnected world, computing has become somehow less globalized recently. - Microsoft doing VR stuff on Facebook's platform is totally in line with their observations on Microsoft's strategy going forward, but Microsoft and Facebook also compete on the ecosystem front, and the implications of this are just brushed over here as that's not the article, but it would be a more interesting one. - The really interesting thing that sets these different companies apart is their revenue sources. Apple sells hardware (and content and lifestyle), Microsoft sells enterprise software subscriptions and cloud, Google sells ad space and cloud.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  > Everyone used to be on Windows Not true. IBM was one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world as recently as 2015. After adjusting for real inflations rates, inclusive of asset inflation, they actually made greater profits some years then either Google or Meta or Amazon do today.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    You're of course right, I was exaggerating for effect. What I mean is that the PC stole a lot of other people's lunches, and PCs across the world had an almost equal likelihood across the world to be running Windows, and that mattered when the PC and what you could run on it (i.e. the app format) mattered. Now it doesn't matter all that much anymore if you're on a Mac or a Windows or a Linux computer. You can largely use the same apps and services across them (with the exception of gaming, which, as an interesting aside, is now much better on Linux than on Mac). Anyone expending the effort to make a new app will usually build them that way, while in the past, you had a lot of platform exclusives. But what is new and interesting is that a Google account doesn't deliver you as much value in South Korea because a lot of its services are unavailable or bad there, while it's nigh on impossible to live without a Kakao account, which in turn is entirely optional in, well, most everywhere else. I find it fascinating that the global reach of user-centric/service-oriented computing is less than the reach of the previous device-oriented computing. It's certainly also not true that geopolitics have never mattered before in computing and reaching users, but I'd say they matter more than ever before.
chaostheory 4y ago
> The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own This isn’t a surprise given the sales numbers of hardware and DAU of meta online properties. While they are the clear leader in VR, given how great the Quest 2 and its original pricing were it should have had much higher sales numbers and usage. That result also wasn’t a surprise given that the Facebook brand was so toxic to the masses, that even changing names to meta hasn’t mitigated it yet in the short term. The name change will pay off eventually for younger generations who aren’t very familiar with Facebook, but that day is about a decade away

karmakaze 4y ago

Initially I thought MS might have learned from missing out on mobile to get ahead in AR/MR/VR and be a device and platform leader. It seems what they learned is to give up before entering and focus on partnering instead. That is something they've always succeeded at PC+DOS, IBM+WindowsNT, Apple+Office, JavaVM. To me it does seem a low target to aim for. VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone, Edge browser, etc. I suppose I could call that corporate self-awareness.

WorldMaker 4y ago
Here specifically too: Microsoft has such a weird lead in AR/MR/VR and have mostly just been sitting on it. For example, because of early Kinect work, they own the patents that would have made Meta's weird journey between "no legs" to "everyone gets legs if they want them! excitement!" irrelevant or much faster had the partnership happened sooner. They built the first "metaverse cloud" on Azure and they've used it and they've made something as exciting in theory as the HoloLens boring Enterprise products. The other possible takeaway is that after Windows Phone, Microsoft really has been truly risk adverse when it comes to consumer products, even in areas where they had a lead and could have delivered something no one else could. > VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone Windows Phone was arguably very well executed at the software level. Microsoft's troubles with Windows Phone were at the hardware levels and (worse) the economic levels where the phone carriers had already decided they prefer a duopoly and selling three things is one too many things to sell.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Windows Phone was bad executed at development experience level, with the WinRT, UAP, UWP enforced rewrites.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    We've had this argument more than once and I still disagree with that take. I took a .NET application through those transitions and there was never a "from scratch rewrite" step at any point. A lot of cheese moved and there was sometimes quite a bit of XAML shifts to meet new UI expectations, but most of the business logic code stayed the same or barely changed. On the other side, I've seen Apple enforce equal or worse "enforced" rewrites between major iOS versions with not even a fraction of the complaints Microsoft got across those product versions. (I had more inconvenience moving apps back and forth between WPF and Silverlight in some of the years prior, and even those moves were never from-scratch rewrites. Admittedly that may have left me with more skills to handle XAML changes and write to lowest common denominator XAML, so I am aware of my biases.) I realize you aren't ever going to agree with me on this, and I don't expect you to. I do think it is still useful for other people to see that there are counter-opinions here.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Apple can get away with a lot more given its dominant market position (esp. when it comes to delivering paying customers to app authors). But when you're the new scrappy contender with minimal market share, so you need the devs to make apps for your store rather than the other way around, it better be smooth sailing all around.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      A rewrite is a rewrite, even if only one line changes. Not going to bother to list everything that changed, it is public available for anyone to judge.
    - karmakaze 4y ago
      The difference of course is that iOS already has enough adoption to get away with this. Windows Phone and Windows UI development forked for no good reason while keeping very similar names and structures while trying to get initial adoption. It was clearly a mistake at that stage. I personally looked into the tech and as soon as I saw how fragmented it was realized MS didn't have a good plan and didn't venture developing for it.

sho_hn 4y ago

That's not the point of the title. The point of the article (and their coverage of MS for years) is that Microsoft used to be all about Windows: An operating system that abstracts hardware and enables first- and third-party apps. And now they making themselves about a system that abstracts hardware and runs apps again, but across a spectrum of devices and front-to-back. The common element is now the user and their account, not the single PC it runs on. I also think it's obvious, but then salient things are. Consumers today don't decide between PC vendors and operating systems, but between entire company-branded computing ecosystems. Are you on the Google or Apple or Amazon train? Things Stratechery doesn't discuss enough and this article is poor about: - Unlike in the Windows days, in the new competing-ecosystems world, geopolitics plays a much grander role. Everyone used to be on Windows, not everyone is on Google. China, Korea, Russia all have their own ecosystem juggernauts. In our globally interconnected world, computing has become somehow less globalized recently. - Microsoft doing VR stuff on Facebook's platform is totally in line with their observations on Microsoft's strategy going forward, but Microsoft and Facebook also compete on the ecosystem front, and the implications of this are just brushed over here as that's not the article, but it would be a more interesting one. - The really interesting thing that sets these different companies apart is their revenue sources. Apple sells hardware (and content and lifestyle), Microsoft sells enterprise software subscriptions and cloud, Google sells ad space and cloud.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
> Everyone used to be on Windows Not true. IBM was one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world as recently as 2015. After adjusting for real inflations rates, inclusive of asset inflation, they actually made greater profits some years then either Google or Meta or Amazon do today.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  You're of course right, I was exaggerating for effect. What I mean is that the PC stole a lot of other people's lunches, and PCs across the world had an almost equal likelihood across the world to be running Windows, and that mattered when the PC and what you could run on it (i.e. the app format) mattered. Now it doesn't matter all that much anymore if you're on a Mac or a Windows or a Linux computer. You can largely use the same apps and services across them (with the exception of gaming, which, as an interesting aside, is now much better on Linux than on Mac). Anyone expending the effort to make a new app will usually build them that way, while in the past, you had a lot of platform exclusives. But what is new and interesting is that a Google account doesn't deliver you as much value in South Korea because a lot of its services are unavailable or bad there, while it's nigh on impossible to live without a Kakao account, which in turn is entirely optional in, well, most everywhere else. I find it fascinating that the global reach of user-centric/service-oriented computing is less than the reach of the previous device-oriented computing. It's certainly also not true that geopolitics have never mattered before in computing and reaching users, but I'd say they matter more than ever before.

chaostheory 4y ago

> The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own This isn’t a surprise given the sales numbers of hardware and DAU of meta online properties. While they are the clear leader in VR, given how great the Quest 2 and its original pricing were it should have had much higher sales numbers and usage. That result also wasn’t a surprise given that the Facebook brand was so toxic to the masses, that even changing names to meta hasn’t mitigated it yet in the short term. The name change will pay off eventually for younger generations who aren’t very familiar with Facebook, but that day is about a decade away