6 ms·
One of the things I find very frustrating about Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Google) is how they will walk back nearly anything at the slightest pushback a
by VyseofArcadia 3y ago
One of the things I find very frustrating about Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Google) is how they will walk back nearly anything at the slightest pushback and cancel anything that isn't an immediate overnight success.
The Kinect was really, really cool tech, and I dream about what could have been if MS had not made the Kinect thst came with the XBox One optional pretty much right after it was announced.
- RockRobotRock 3y agoOut of all the examples, why Kinect? They did the right thing and made it accessible for developers, but why would the Kinect ever work for Xbox players who are on average 33 year old males? It was gimmicky and fraught with bad silliness from the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Milo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Milo
- eichin 3y agoThe Kinect (and especially the cheap knockoffs that followed) changed the field of amateur robotics, just not gaming... in robotics, there was a lot of "it was great for us but we really have no idea why they did that" :-)
- jnwatson 3y agoMicrosoft tried the Kinect for 13 years. How long are they supposed to let a product run? It was a cool tech solution in search of a problem.
- VyseofArcadia 3y agoYou're glossing over a big part of the story. It is hard, really, really hard, to convince game developers and publishers to make games that require an optional accessory. It's been tried again and again and it is never more than a mild success and usually an abject failure. They want to target the base platform, which will always have a dramatically larger install base. Thr original Kinect was just such an optional accessory, and yeah, didn't have much in the way of third party support. The XB1 could have, and would have, encouraged more devs to use and experiment with the Kinect because devs could be assured that every single user would have one hooked up. Except that Microsoft chickened out instead of sticking to their guns. As usual.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoMicrosoft chickened out because Sony was absolutely slaughtering them in sales by being $100 cheaper. Granted price isn’t the only reason - MS’s self-inflicted bad PRs and slightly lower graphical performance of the XB1 - but it really wasn’t helping. At the end of the day, their core demographic wasn’t interested in the gimmick that was the Kinect.
- userinanother 3y agoI hope they learned that lesson and now have at least 10% more power than Sony. It doesn’t really matter but early adopters drool about minor performance differences.
- xbmcuser 3y agoThat's not how you bring in adoption or sell products. They should have build something amazing using Kinect that everyone would have wanted one and not cared about buying it separately. Then if everyone had one then devs would have come. But they themselves did not have some amazing use for it.
- VyseofArcadia 3y agoThat's naïve. No matter how amazing your launch game is, a large fraction of your install base will just never bother. Maybe they don't have the money, or they're just frugal. Maybe they're skeptical and reluctant to upgrade. Maybe they just don't like whatever genre of game. It has been tried again and again and again. Optional console accessories and upgrades just never have enough of an install base to attract a critical mass of devs.
- spencerhakim 3y agoThe Kinect is great at full-body tracking for VR, Microsoft was just a decade too early in their attempt to bring the technology to market.
- akhosravian 3y agoThe Kinect was released in November 2010. Are you suggesting they’re still running it? My understanding is it died ~six months after the Xbox one released (early 2014) when they stopped bundling it with that console. They kept selling it for several years after, but it was inconceivable it would do anything but die at that point.
- JeremyNT 3y agoI mean, it was a better gimmick than the Wii, but it turns out the Wii was good enough. People didn't want to pay a premium price for a motion gimmick. The Wii hit the sweet spot for casual gamers and they didn't care that the fidelity was lousy.
- tibbydudeza 3y agoA product in search of a problem - that game "Milo" was such a scripted farce.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TulliusCicero 3y agoThe Kinect is a bad example of this. It was fundamentally gimmicky and didn't seem to have somewhere to go.
- tiernano 3y agobit of an anecdote on testing the Kinect. I was working in the Office devision at the time it launched and managed to (some how) get into the beta test team. They sent me one, originally with the plan of wanting it back, but in the end they said we could keep it. I still have mine somewhere with the Microsoft Asset tag on it... Anyway, after the first couple of weeks, testers got a general email about testing the device. "Please wear clothes when testing the Kinect". Anyway, on what i think it could have been, Cortana on the Xbox with a Kinect and the video features would have been perfect for a lot of things. The vision stuff for games is good, but think watching for fall detection of people in rooms, if you are out and it sees movement (given it could turn to an extent) and the ability to tell it to call someone on Skype with video! That would have been useful in 2020! It was just way too early, like a LOT of Microsoft stuff (Pocket PC, Windows Smart Phone (CE editions), Windows Phone (NT Kernel), Microsoft Tablets (XP) etc. All just a little ahead of the time...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HomeDeLaPot 3y agoWish they would have done this with Teams
- danw1979 3y agoI agree… if you can’t even make the scroll bar on a chat history work, it’s time to give up.
- leeman2016 3y agoI feel like there is an entire OS starting up behind Teams, when I start/open it up
- Terretta 3y agoThere is, it's called SharePoint.
- akhosravian 3y agoTeams has the advantage of being able to juice their numbers by counting everyone with an office license as a customer.
- happymellon 3y agoI wish they would do this to Edge.
- glimshe 3y agoQuite the contrary, in my opinion. Microsoft kept going with XBOX despite of years of criticism, especially during the early cablegate days. Kinect was a feature only enjoyed by a niche audience, no disrespect intended. Despite being an avid gamer, I never even once considered buying Kinect.