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The HoloLens was discontinued because there was no team left. Everyone important left years ago for Meta and Apple, or startups like Magic leap. There have bee
by dagmx 2y ago
The HoloLens was discontinued because there was no team left.
Everyone important left years ago for Meta and Apple, or startups like Magic leap. There have been several exoduses, whether it was due to bad leadership (see below), military contracts or just a program that was never treated more than an R&D outlet like the Kinect DX was too.
Then the remaining head of program was fired for watching porn during team reviews in headset. Among other allegations of impropriety. Before that, he was considered an awful boss to work for by many.
With nobody left, Microsoft had a ghost project that was eventually killed off. Anyone in this space knew it was coming just by talking to any one on the team.
Its death means nothing more than Microsoft has once again shown it can’t stick with things outside its core competencies.
The HoloLens was also a significantly more limited device because of the nature of waveguides. There are definitely advantages to additive displays but if anyone’s used a HoloLens 1/2, it’s a far inferior experience to the Vision Pro or even other waveguide based products like Magic Leap.
- sureIy 2y ago> The HoloLens was discontinued because there was no team left. Chicken or the egg? I don't believe that they couldn't find more people to work for it. Pay double, no one would leave. If they let a whole project die, they just weren't interested enough.
- dagmx 2y agoYou don’t just suddenly pay double for an entire team when you have endemic problems in the organization. Especially when Meta and Magic Leap were also throwing money at these people, and Apple was throwing their entire ecosystem might at it. For some of these roles, it’s highly specialized people and you can’t find just any engineer to replace them. When your vision leaders leave, you can’t just find someone to replace them. When they’re leaving because the head of program is an abusive pervert, money isn’t enough to keep them. And this is a recurring theme with anything outside of Microsoft’s core competencies. They cannot long term execute. Windows and servers has been their competency since the 90s and has been firmly stuck there. Mobile computing? Failed twice. Music players? Failed. Xbox? Currently in the process of failing for the second generation in a row. Microsoft do not have the necessary culture to do this. They leave things on the vine and see if it dies or blooms. They don’t weave a story or make strong ecosystem plays. That’s the biggest difference between them and Apple. An Apple product comes with a vision story. It comes with the ecosystem.
- catgary 2y agoYeah my wife briefly worked with a team on Bing, she said her team was basically operating like horror stories she’d been told about outsourcing sweatshops, complete with verbal abuse from managers and general disrespect from developers for a woman in a management/leadership role. She was later told that this is a pretty typical experience if you end up in a lower priority team that’s primarily made up on contractors.
- sureIy 2y agoYou can't honestly call Xbox a failure. This is a $20B market and about 10% of Microsoft's revenue.
- dagmx 2y agoAs a physical product (which my list was about) , you absolutely can. They went from dominating in the 360 era (when Sony fumbled the PS3, and Nintendo switched directions to the Wii) to two generations of poorly received releases and being in third place. That’s even if you filter by the specific markets they dominated in with the 360. And what are they focused on now? Windows gaming and cloud services. Their two core competencies. And why? The people behind the original Xbox and 360 vision left. When you have no vision leaders in the company you fall back to what you know. In their case: windows and cloud services.
- kingkongjaffa 2y agoSeems like you have thought about this a lot. What do you think about xbox? It seems like with cross play and gamepass they should be doing well but maybe they are failing with console price/quality and poor exclusives.