Sure, Windows Mixed Reality wasn’t great. Maybe in the current marketplace it was the Windows 2.0 to Apple’s Mac. But the old Microsoft would have persisted when underestimated and come back with a sneakily good 3.0 product.
Meta's headset is Android based so it has 18+ years of low power, ARM performance and power tweaking. And Apple is using their in-house M series chips.
Microsoft's bread and butter is B2B; Azure, Office, etc. The Xbox and consumer divisions are just too small to take on high cost, novel devices. They've historically not been great at branding or marketing direct to consumer either. (Zune, those Microsoft store commercials, etc.).
When they invested in Windows 1.0, their existing users were not asking for it and didn’t have a use for it. MS-DOS wasn’t a good foundation for a GUI, the IBM PC hardware was misaligned (e.g. terrible graphics), and obviously Apple was miles ahead.
The product didn’t fit any of Microsoft’s existing strengths and felt like a toy rather than a credible business tool. By the same logic that’s applied to AR/VR today, Microsoft absolutely should have exited the GUI market in 1988. (They were even a leading Mac software vendor! Why bother making their own worse GUI?)
In 1985 it was terrible for games due to no sprites, but business applications run on the Hercules graphics card (monochrome but 720x348) or EGA, which had decent resolution and was way better than the competition for business applications. It had worse color resolution than say the Amiga, but by 1988 the VGA had fixed that as well.
In that phase, it makes absolute sense to reduce or cut anything that is not CURRENTLY performing well, in favor of the area that is taking off and needs all the push you can give it. When the gen AI market stabilizes, ideally with Microsoft in a dominant position, it will again be appropriate to diversify bets. That includes pushes for markets where MS can grab 2nd or even 3rd place.
You can't get a winner if you leave the game early.
I do think the stupid ads and rent seeking turned out to be so incredibly lucrative that it's essentially all that companies can think about.
Which of these decisions end up working out or not requires waiting 10+ years and looking back. Companies were hyped about 3D TVs, some held out longer than others, it turned out to be a bad idea. Companies were hyped about e-readers in the 90s but it didn't pan out at first only to be successful with future innovations and iterations and it turned out to be a good idea.
Apple's VR is nothing new and will also fail.
But Apple?!
Bit off more than you could chew, there, I think.
Quest games make much more sense because it's a completely different thing to non-VR games. You can't just say "well I'll play beatsabre on my laptop".
That said, they seem to be losing money hand over fist anyway.
[0] https://xrdailynews.com/quest-3-bom-production-costs-reveale...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/vr-market-shrinking-as-meta-...
"This deprecation does not impact HoloLens."
Teams integration was pushed and is a mess with or without XR. They finally launched something that should be able to connect web cam and XR users in a teams session but why... AFAICT it's in a special teams app. Apple's face time windows that are not a full overlay are a better fit for a productive experience. I haven't checked out the new Teams yet, though. Maybe its just not in the marketing material.
They had the first inkling of the exciting spatially anchored app stuff that the Vision Pro is pushing but it just was not fleshed out or really pursued beyond proof of concept.
MR for Windows was just not a good value add in general. It didn't supplant SteamVR or Oculus and Microsoft didn't (and doesn't) have a way to capitalize on their commoditization so what even is the point?
Right now, making XR apps is their only coherent strategy.