3 ms·

Garden variety no-analysis hot take demonstrating a lack of understanding of how platforms launch & grow and what trajectory this is going in. Personally I thi

by npunt 3y ago

Garden variety no-analysis hot take demonstrating a lack of understanding of how platforms launch & grow and what trajectory this is going in. Personally I think Apple missed a bit in the marketing by positioning this so heavily on average consumer use cases (3d pics of kids!) rather than professional use cases, where yes, having immersive shared environments can be helpful while avoiding any of the legitimate 'consume your life' issues with tech in our personal lives. "Boot up an office at home when you need it" is an extremely compelling use case and is compatible with the ideals of making computing (and work!) more humane. Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to understand product positioning or have the vision to see possibilities enough to discuss the consumer v work nuance. And the isolation critique could have been interesting but it just defaulted to 'big company bad, tech bad.' Critics are essential, we deserve better ones.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
it may lack understanding the technicalities around marking and product launches... but instead it has a mundane understanding of what most people actually consider important in life fortunately his critique is not around the specifics of how this product was made (and 'launched') but about whether this product should be made in the first place technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago; but where is that now?
- npunt 3y ago
  Any 'should this product be launched' critique should come armed with an understanding of what the product's trajectory is and what it could be capable of, which the author failed to demonstrate. That's not particularly surprising, most people aren't very imaginative, so it read like something most people would write: a hot take with a few old talking points. Re:HoloLens, it failed because Microsoft is not an organization that can build category-defining consumer products. Vision is worlds apart technically from the HoloLens' tech demo level quality. Whether or not it succeeds in the market, Apple was not fucking around or half-assing the tech. This was spare no expense, leave no nuance unpolished, culmination of a decade of deep technical investment and the merging of 30 different workstreams stuff. I can hardly imagine the complexity of the product roadmap that led to it. Re:mundane understanding, I'm not so sure. Taken as-is with the gen1 hardware we saw, I think Vision should have been targeted a bit more at workplace than consumer given the form factor. But more broadly, the whole product is really just a prelude for what experience we can expect within an AR glasses form factor in the coming decade(s), and products like this need to put a stake in the ground on what they're going to be about. To give you some sense of why HoloLens never made it: it was timed wrong for the tech (way too early), it was incubated in a company that has never defined a consumer product category and lacks the talent / organizational structure / gravitas to do so, Microsoft lacked the courage to invest in it, it failed to define valuable broad market use cases, it couldn't leverage developers, it lacked multi-year investments in like 10 different key technologies, it had entirely the wrong form factor, etc etc. There wasn't a snowballs chance in hell HoloLens was going to be a consumer product without being fundamentally different.
- drewbeck 3y ago
  > technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago If I recall MSFT had demos of people jumping around shooting aliens in their living room. That's a very different product idea than what Apple showed today – a "product idea" is specifically not about the technology, but what you the company thinks people will do with it.
ralfn 3y ago
>Personally I think Apple missed a bit in the marketing by positioning this so heavily on average consumer use cases Yeah especially with bringing iOS ecosystem, it means that for (general) developers it's not interesting. If they were demoing a shell, a code editor, etc. But if it's iOS it's just too locked down. Developers are actually good first generation buyers. They can likely make their boss pay for. So it's such a waste, they are excluded because iOS

by npunt 3y ago

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

it may lack understanding the technicalities around marking and product launches... but instead it has a mundane understanding of what most people actually consider important in life fortunately his critique is not around the specifics of how this product was made (and 'launched') but about whether this product should be made in the first place technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago; but where is that now?

npunt 3y ago
Any 'should this product be launched' critique should come armed with an understanding of what the product's trajectory is and what it could be capable of, which the author failed to demonstrate. That's not particularly surprising, most people aren't very imaginative, so it read like something most people would write: a hot take with a few old talking points. Re:HoloLens, it failed because Microsoft is not an organization that can build category-defining consumer products. Vision is worlds apart technically from the HoloLens' tech demo level quality. Whether or not it succeeds in the market, Apple was not fucking around or half-assing the tech. This was spare no expense, leave no nuance unpolished, culmination of a decade of deep technical investment and the merging of 30 different workstreams stuff. I can hardly imagine the complexity of the product roadmap that led to it. Re:mundane understanding, I'm not so sure. Taken as-is with the gen1 hardware we saw, I think Vision should have been targeted a bit more at workplace than consumer given the form factor. But more broadly, the whole product is really just a prelude for what experience we can expect within an AR glasses form factor in the coming decade(s), and products like this need to put a stake in the ground on what they're going to be about. To give you some sense of why HoloLens never made it: it was timed wrong for the tech (way too early), it was incubated in a company that has never defined a consumer product category and lacks the talent / organizational structure / gravitas to do so, Microsoft lacked the courage to invest in it, it failed to define valuable broad market use cases, it couldn't leverage developers, it lacked multi-year investments in like 10 different key technologies, it had entirely the wrong form factor, etc etc. There wasn't a snowballs chance in hell HoloLens was going to be a consumer product without being fundamentally different.
drewbeck 3y ago
> technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago If I recall MSFT had demos of people jumping around shooting aliens in their living room. That's a very different product idea than what Apple showed today – a "product idea" is specifically not about the technology, but what you the company thinks people will do with it.

ralfn 3y ago

>Personally I think Apple missed a bit in the marketing by positioning this so heavily on average consumer use cases Yeah especially with bringing iOS ecosystem, it means that for (general) developers it's not interesting. If they were demoing a shell, a code editor, etc. But if it's iOS it's just too locked down. Developers are actually good first generation buyers. They can likely make their boss pay for. So it's such a waste, they are excluded because iOS