The Microsoft HoloLens also supposedly had “business” applications, but was ultimately discontinued. The Apple Vision Pro was DOA, Apple just refuses to come to terms with that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The gamepass and cross play is nice, but they don’t have compelling exclusives to drive hardware sales. Combine that with absolutely terrible product strategy like their naming strategy and rewriting feature parity between the S and X, it’s no wonder they’re third place now.
Gamepass has only further eroded their console market because it reduces the need to buy it when you can play on your computer or stream.
They’ve also barely capitalized on many of their extravagant purchases yet. Especially with Activision Blizzard, it remains to be seen how they’ll do exclusives without falling afoul of antitrust.
"Augmented for surgical success—a reality now"
https://www.accenture.com/in-en/case-studies/technology/micr...
"Microsoft HoloLens 2 in Medical and Healthcare Context: State of the Art and Future Prospects"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9611914/
"AR in medicine: Spinal surgery via Hololens 2 shows the future of medicine"
https://mixed-news.com/en/ar-surgery-hololens-future-of-medi... "Providence Swedish advances brain surgery and presurgical planning with Microsoft HoloLens 2"
"Providence Swedish advances brain surgery and presurgical planning with Microsoft HoloLens 2"
https://blog.swedish.org/swedish-news/providence-swedish-is-...
"World Premiere Shoulder Surgery with Microsoft HoloLens"
https://www.evolutis-group.com/en/world-premiere-shoulder-su...
They’re just saying it does what they need better. A significantly higher resolution, image clarity and field of view than what the HoloLens could provide.
From the article:
> In previous years, Horgan tried other headsets, like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens, and found they weren’t high-resolution enough.
There’s another mention of HoloLens as well in the article.
I think iterations of Vision Pro will take years and the final cost will not be what it is today. What everyone sees today is a developer toolkit that also serves as a public demo. It is not a consumer product that can be scaled (yet).
First, when I got my first iPhone, I was amazed by it. I used it all the time. Yes, there were missing features and shortcomings, but many/most of those missing features were obvious, and it was actually pretty delightful that with every new software update I'd cross some of those missing features off the list.
None of that dynamic exists with the Apple Vision Pro. Even big Apple fanboys end up leaving it unused after the novelty wears off because it's fundamentally a solution looking for a problem. People aren't leaving it untouched in a drawer because there are just a couple missing features they want.
Now, all that said, as much as I would dread having this computer strapped to my face as a "normal" person, I think the use case given in this article makes perfect sense. The surgeon is doing a specific task, and the Vision Pro helps with that specific task. While I believe the Vision Pro will fail as a general consumer product, I hope it can live on for these niche use cases, although I don't know if the economics will make sense for such a relatively small market.
If you gave me an Apple Vision Pro, I literally have no idea what I would do with it. I would really love to get into something new like this but I literally can't think of what I would do with it. It is a technology that seems unreasonably useless. It seems like there should be many more use cases than there is.
TBH the dynamic you're describing would have been Meta's glasses if they also release a viable version of Orion as the second product. But at this point nobody's in a place to make it a reality, the fact that Apple actually released the Vision Pro is the most telling sign that they don't see themselves reaching that level anytime soon.
Meta hasn't sold tons but 700k for a device that needs to get past people's privacy concerns is decent and then Meta showing off Orion .. where Ray Bans are headed in a few years i think is pretty cool.
The elephant in the room is that we're already really good at human-computer interfaces. VR not only isn't an upgrade, it's a downgrade.
The precision of tapping in 3D space is much lower than on a screen or a keyboard. Typing in VR becomes 10x harder. Voice isn't a solution either, because talking is always slower than typing. And for gestures, swiping on a phone is already really fast. Swiping in 3D isn't any faster.
The most precise and fastest is, of course, keyboard and mouse. Touchscreens are a step-down, but one we took for the advantage of super tiny devices you always have on you.
VR is certainly not tiny. And, even if it can be and you can just wear it whenever - what's the benefit? Going from a laptop to a phone is obvious, but a phone is already very small and already always on you. What do you gain then from a VR device? I think probably next to nothing.