5 ms·

So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing. It happened with Mobile phones, browsers, tablets, AI.

by MikusR 3y ago

caslon 3y ago
They've been in the process of pulling out since before the Vision Pro was announced; HP was the canary in the coal mine, firing or moving around everyone they had working on WMR devices a year or two ago. When HP pulls out of a Microsoft initiative, it's over.
vdaea 3y ago
As it starts growing? Is there any indication that mixed reality in Windows 11 has ever grown?
- andybak 3y ago
  They meant "Mixed Reality" in general. The Apple Vision Pro has just launched. You can debate whether it will be succesful or not (please - do that in another discussion thread as it a topic I grow weary of) but the timing is worthy of note.
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    So the entire opinion of "Microsoft leaving as a field starts growing" rests on the Vision Pro coming out and therefore VR growing, but we should not question the fact that Vision Pro is unquestionable proof VR is growing in this thread... No. VR is not growing. Apple was supposed to put out Vision Pro in 2021 when everyone was aboard the VR hypetrain, and AI was not in the public's mindset. Vision Pro is not the VR industry growing, it's an echo from yet another dead VR hypecycle.
    - andybak 3y ago
      > but we should not question the fact that Vision Pro is unquestionable proof VR is growing in this thread... I was simply asking that we don't recycle the same metadiscussion yet again.
      - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
        Well the metadiscussion upends the whole discussion. Microsoft should've wrapped up their HoloLens research and offered a nice low-volume product for researches, engineers, and designers. We need such products, and it's a shame they abandoned it. But they keep trying to find the "next big thing". And VR is absolutely not the "next big thing". So if they only see value in that, they were right to cut losses and move on to focus their resources on other things like AI.
        andybak 3y ago
        I rather agree than chasing mass-market VR (with "mass" defined as "the new smartphone") is a huge part of the problem. However I do think VR potentially has a large niche to fill amoung consumers, hobbyists and various semi-professional roles. Something bigger than you're suggesting but smaller than say - consoles or smartphones. Whether this is a niche big enough for Microsoft, I genuinely don't know. I think it probably is - but it would require aggregating several quite diverse market segments.
        worthless-trash 3y ago
        I could be wrong , I think the notes say "This deprecation does not impact HoloLens.".
        GeekyBear 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure that laying off the HoloLens team last year impacts the future of HoloLens.
        worthless-trash 3y ago
        This software update though, i'm reading the linked article.
imiric 3y ago
They were outcompeted in mobile and tablets. They had the most popular web browser for a good decade in the late 90s and early 00s, until they were outcompeted there too. But how are they abandoning AI? They're a major part of the leading AI company.
- MikusR 3y ago
  They finished killing Cortana some time before starting from scratch with Copilot
- thimp 3y ago
  They're not abandoning AI yet. They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They also have little to no profitability model around it and the development is operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon advancements and user count down the line. The thing is 99% of the people I know either played with their proposition and found it irritating or don't give a shit. They literally just want to be left alone and for people not to keep changing things. The machine is a means to an end and that end is well defined for them already. Only the tech and investment industries are gushing all over this and the latter are only riding the hype. Typical MS this. Give it 5 years and read this comment again...
  - keyringlight 3y ago
    It's hard not to see it from the perspective of "for the person with a hammer, everything is a nail", Azure and already having the capability to build data centers is their hammer and the nail is a compute-heavy task. There's an element of speculation if whether it will be a lasting wave of the future people will pay for, but they have the levers to pull in case it is. It wouldn't be the first time they or any other company has made a bet so they don't get left out, time will tell if AI becomes a part of the furniture commodity or doesn't prove broadly valuable and fades away after a change of direction. The interesting thing for me is the push for AI hardware as a baseline in consumer chips, right now I'd assume training and inference is done on their servers, but as it moves from a development/exploration phase to regular operations and scales up they want to offload inference to save costs, and probably provide a better experience running a model locally.
de6u99er 3y ago
> So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing. I don't see VR/AR growing. Quite the opposite. E.g.: https://mixed-news.com/en/steamvr-february-2023/ https://mixed-news.com/en/steamvr-february-2023/
- tasoeur 3y ago
  Some contrast to this comment: this is steamVR data which is not only specific to steam (which as pointed out in the article, is not representative of the entire market) but also mostly biased towards gaming. Now I will concede that VR has mostly been “successful” with that demographic (gaming), in fact, oculus (now quest) is mostly making money solely on that sort of content… some people at Meta while I was there would even argue that this product should limit its ambition to be the “Nintendo switch of VR”. Apple on the contrary has been setting expectations much more clearly that gaming is not in the forefront (but not excluded). Whether it will be successful is another story, but we should still welcome new challengers in an industry / product category. What happened to the excitement in tech everyone :-)
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    oculus always wanted the walled garden approach, but steamvr had so much more content that users were unhappy that their vr display device wouldn't play steamvr games even though it technically was possible (in fact people hacked it in before it was officially enabled). Now that oculus has made the device cheaper so more non pc gamers are playing I'm sure they're selling more software themselves. Valve also hasn't launched a headset in a while and wasn't targeting low budget headsets at all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    I'm not sure 6 million MAU is really "successful" when game consoles are approaching 400 million MAU and they're still mostly nerd boxes. Let's reserve "successful" for products that break 10 million MAU or perhaps 100 million MAU. A few hundred thousand devices, as Apple will sell this year, or a few million devices, as Meta has deployed successfully over the last decade, that's just not mainstream and not even close to any other Apple release in terms of sales or fashion factor (AVP is actually anti-fashion, a real departure for Apple.)
thimp 3y ago
Yeah that. They enter every single market, deliver a half-assed broken product with dubious gains and expect to pick up business and when it doesn't they shelve it, even if the market is heading in that direction. At the same time they compromise their core business with the fads they pick up because attention is diverted. Can you imagine what it's going to be like getting all the unused AI crap out of windows and office when the inevitable incoming AI winter hits. Dear MS, can you please just concentrate on your core business. We know it's dreary but we just want Windows, Office and AD that doesn't suck balls.

So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing. It happened with Mobile phones, browsers, tablets, AI.

by MikusR 3y ago

So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing. It happened with Mobile phones, browsers, tablets, AI.

They've been in the process of pulling out since before the Vision Pro was announced; HP was the canary in the coal mine, firing or moving around everyone they had working on WMR devices a year or two ago. When HP pulls out of a Microsoft initiative, it's over.

vdaea 3y ago

As it starts growing? Is there any indication that mixed reality in Windows 11 has ever grown?

andybak 3y ago
They meant "Mixed Reality" in general. The Apple Vision Pro has just launched. You can debate whether it will be succesful or not (please - do that in another discussion thread as it a topic I grow weary of) but the timing is worthy of note.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  So the entire opinion of "Microsoft leaving as a field starts growing" rests on the Vision Pro coming out and therefore VR growing, but we should not question the fact that Vision Pro is unquestionable proof VR is growing in this thread... No. VR is not growing. Apple was supposed to put out Vision Pro in 2021 when everyone was aboard the VR hypetrain, and AI was not in the public's mindset. Vision Pro is not the VR industry growing, it's an echo from yet another dead VR hypecycle.
  - andybak 3y ago
    > but we should not question the fact that Vision Pro is unquestionable proof VR is growing in this thread... I was simply asking that we don't recycle the same metadiscussion yet again.
    - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
      Well the metadiscussion upends the whole discussion. Microsoft should've wrapped up their HoloLens research and offered a nice low-volume product for researches, engineers, and designers. We need such products, and it's a shame they abandoned it. But they keep trying to find the "next big thing". And VR is absolutely not the "next big thing". So if they only see value in that, they were right to cut losses and move on to focus their resources on other things like AI.
      - andybak 3y ago
        I rather agree than chasing mass-market VR (with "mass" defined as "the new smartphone") is a huge part of the problem. However I do think VR potentially has a large niche to fill amoung consumers, hobbyists and various semi-professional roles. Something bigger than you're suggesting but smaller than say - consoles or smartphones. Whether this is a niche big enough for Microsoft, I genuinely don't know. I think it probably is - but it would require aggregating several quite diverse market segments.
      - worthless-trash 3y ago
        I could be wrong , I think the notes say "This deprecation does not impact HoloLens.".
        GeekyBear 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure that laying off the HoloLens team last year impacts the future of HoloLens.
        worthless-trash 3y ago
        This software update though, i'm reading the linked article.

imiric 3y ago

They were outcompeted in mobile and tablets. They had the most popular web browser for a good decade in the late 90s and early 00s, until they were outcompeted there too. But how are they abandoning AI? They're a major part of the leading AI company.

MikusR 3y ago
They finished killing Cortana some time before starting from scratch with Copilot
thimp 3y ago
They're not abandoning AI yet. They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They also have little to no profitability model around it and the development is operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon advancements and user count down the line. The thing is 99% of the people I know either played with their proposition and found it irritating or don't give a shit. They literally just want to be left alone and for people not to keep changing things. The machine is a means to an end and that end is well defined for them already. Only the tech and investment industries are gushing all over this and the latter are only riding the hype. Typical MS this. Give it 5 years and read this comment again...
- keyringlight 3y ago
  It's hard not to see it from the perspective of "for the person with a hammer, everything is a nail", Azure and already having the capability to build data centers is their hammer and the nail is a compute-heavy task. There's an element of speculation if whether it will be a lasting wave of the future people will pay for, but they have the levers to pull in case it is. It wouldn't be the first time they or any other company has made a bet so they don't get left out, time will tell if AI becomes a part of the furniture commodity or doesn't prove broadly valuable and fades away after a change of direction. The interesting thing for me is the push for AI hardware as a baseline in consumer chips, right now I'd assume training and inference is done on their servers, but as it moves from a development/exploration phase to regular operations and scales up they want to offload inference to save costs, and probably provide a better experience running a model locally.

de6u99er 3y ago

> So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing. I don't see VR/AR growing. Quite the opposite. E.g.: https://mixed-news.com/en/steamvr-february-2023/ https://mixed-news.com/en/steamvr-february-2023/

tasoeur 3y ago
Some contrast to this comment: this is steamVR data which is not only specific to steam (which as pointed out in the article, is not representative of the entire market) but also mostly biased towards gaming. Now I will concede that VR has mostly been “successful” with that demographic (gaming), in fact, oculus (now quest) is mostly making money solely on that sort of content… some people at Meta while I was there would even argue that this product should limit its ambition to be the “Nintendo switch of VR”. Apple on the contrary has been setting expectations much more clearly that gaming is not in the forefront (but not excluded). Whether it will be successful is another story, but we should still welcome new challengers in an industry / product category. What happened to the excitement in tech everyone :-)
- LegitShady 3y ago
  oculus always wanted the walled garden approach, but steamvr had so much more content that users were unhappy that their vr display device wouldn't play steamvr games even though it technically was possible (in fact people hacked it in before it was officially enabled). Now that oculus has made the device cheaper so more non pc gamers are playing I'm sure they're selling more software themselves. Valve also hasn't launched a headset in a while and wasn't targeting low budget headsets at all.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- asadotzler 3y ago
  I'm not sure 6 million MAU is really "successful" when game consoles are approaching 400 million MAU and they're still mostly nerd boxes. Let's reserve "successful" for products that break 10 million MAU or perhaps 100 million MAU. A few hundred thousand devices, as Apple will sell this year, or a few million devices, as Meta has deployed successfully over the last decade, that's just not mainstream and not even close to any other Apple release in terms of sales or fashion factor (AVP is actually anti-fashion, a real departure for Apple.)

thimp 3y ago

Yeah that. They enter every single market, deliver a half-assed broken product with dubious gains and expect to pick up business and when it doesn't they shelve it, even if the market is heading in that direction. At the same time they compromise their core business with the fads they pick up because attention is diverted. Can you imagine what it's going to be like getting all the unused AI crap out of windows and office when the inevitable incoming AI winter hits. Dear MS, can you please just concentrate on your core business. We know it's dreary but we just want Windows, Office and AD that doesn't suck balls.