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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft, despite what is going on, is functionally dead on its feet in the consumer space.

They have no plays in the key future markets of identity/social, app data/behavior, web content consumption or advertising, online retail or media distribution.

They sell windows licenses and enterprise services

And with that they have a lot of great stuff, but strategically they have nothing at all in the consumer space other than Xbox. Hololens, the Surface, some car-plane-phone thing or more MSR vision videos are not going to swoop in and change the game. They have no foundation to build on in the consumer market, and seem to act like they don't even notice.

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Based on the general reception of Hololens, I wouldnt count it out. Definitely much more warmly received so far than, for example, the fizzling out of Glass.

Also, MS has some big plays in identity, app data etc and even media distribution right? Correct me if I am wrong, but while they are not dominant or 'winning', Azure Storage, AD and App Insights are pretty good services and heavily used - if not directly by the average consumer, probably indirectly being used by the services that consumer uses.

The reception has been in reaction to some very fake videos--they don't show the limited FOV, and they make the projections appear opaque even under bright stage lighting, which they aren't.

Here is a video showing a third person view of the FOV; it is a bit unfair when objects are really close, because they are at the small end of the frustum pyramid, watch to the end in the immersive environment part to get full picture of how small the FOV is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syFRdNs68s4

Blog post detailing the FOV measurement that went into making the video: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1223

A good deal of the reception comes from the glowing reports of everyone who has tried it, I think.

That being said, they did release a video recently that was a little more realistic of what you might get day one showing the limited FOV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKpKlh1-en0

I saw that video the other day, still very misleading by a factor of about 4 (in area). In that first shot, his forearm is pointing up, so his hand isn't near arms length, but the screen hand ratio looks about right for if it were at arms length. So depending on what his upper arm is doing, the FOV is about doubled (approx 60 degrees wide hoorizontal instead of ~30 degrees), giving it about 4 times too much area in the shot.

To me it just reminds me of Kinect and Molyneux's Milo demo. The Minecraft demo on the table they gave for example was very misleading, because when the camera guy got close to the table, he could still get the whole thing in the shot. Standing by the table you would only actually be able to see tiny slices at a time.

Some outlets have called it out as a big issue--The Verge ( http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8527645/microsoft-hololens-... ), and Tested are two I've seen. I still think it is cool and it is the best that has been broadly publically demoed (Magic Leap has only been shown to a select few, and not in any kind of portable form; and at least some of their embodiments in their patents show only around 30 degree diagonal), but all the footage is misleading about FOV and most of it completely fakes occlusion. Google was guilty of the same with at least one of their big videos around a day in the life of Google Glass.

The guy who did the video and blog post, Oliver Kreylos, has tried HoloLens himself too http://doc-ok.org/?p=1223 .

Online retail?!? This isn't 1998, when everyone thought Microsoft was going to be the gatekeeper to ecommerce, and there was universal naivety about these things. Microsoft has absolutely no business being in online retail. They shouldn't go anywhere near retail at all.

They also shouldn't be in advertising, media distribution, or social. The only company making any money in social, is Facebook. There is very little money in that market, and it's going to remain that way; social is a horrible business.

Media distribution is also a terrible business. Just ask Netflix: ~200 PE ratio, temporarily floating extreme bubble stock, with a whopping $266 million in net income after 20 years in business. They're the king of their segment and that's all they can earn. Pandora and Spotify also have horrible businesses, that have done nothing but bleed large amounts of red ink for a decade. Media distribution primarily profits the content owners, not the distributor. Microsoft should stay very far away from it.

Since when does it make any sense, at all, to try to do everything? It's a horrible business approach, and guarantees mediocrity. Trying to do all of those things is what hurt Microsoft from ~2000-2014.

We live in a culture where "take your work home" is accepted however "bring your toys to work" is not. Bigger picture Microsoft has far more consumer than Apple has enterprise.

The takeaway from Satya is "Look, we don't have to win everywhere, broadly. It's okay to focus on a few great scenarios sometimes."

This is a smart way to set expectations with investors while encouraging more nimble thinking inside the company.

The takeaway from Satya is "Look, we don't have to win everywhere, broadly. It's okay to focus on a few great scenarios sometimes."

And I think this attitude will pay dividends - the we must win at everything ideology means you spread yourself too thin in key, highly profitable areas that are worth having a stake in. When Steve Jobs said for Apple to win, Microsoft doesn't need to lose it led their most focused, eventually most profitable period in their history.

> "bring your toys to work" is not

Isn't "BYOD" a growing phenomenon in the workplace? I think Microsoft chasing mobile is them trying to defend enterprise from Apple/Android handsets.

Yes, and that's exactly one of the things Satya talks about. If people are using Outlook as a Gmail client on iOS and it's enforcing corporate data retention policies via Azure Active Directory then who cares how many iPhones sold to consumers that quarter. The more the better.

Microsoft thought they had to defend the enterprise from iPads, too. Nope, they just needed to make PowerPoint run great on the damn things.

The broader point is that people are bringing their work home and to the extent that Microsoft makes the best productivity tools, they'll never lose "consumer." They get that for free.

When consumer trends change, maybe they'll catch one. Maybe Sony will. Maybe Samsung. But that's really not the front line battle anymore.

They sell Microsoft Office to consumers for hundreds of dollars. What other company sells an actual piece of software for that price?

I'm sure Microsoft has made more money off me in the past five years than Google/Facebook/Apple.

There are dozens of triple A video game titles released every year that retail for $60, which is not bad. If you count piracy, I wouldn't be surprised if the ARPU of an office user approached ARPUs of something like League of Legends.

I'm not sure there are many consumers actually paying hundreds of dollars for office. Enterprises, sure! But mom and dad?

Definitely mom and dad if they have kids who need Office to do their school work. Or if they want to be able to open .docx files at open.

Sometimes that, also sometimes school districts buy Office 365 licenses so that students have access to this software.

Yeah, I wouldn't be too concerned about Microsoft. Please have a look at the numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

If anything, their biggest problem is, like, where to spend the money.

About consumers: Up to a point I would argue: so? Business space is huge. Big orgs - well, most orgs - have Microsoft running their desktops and their it departments are familiar in managing them.

I'm not sure what the consumer aspects of hololens are but from what I hear (from pre release developers external to MS) it has lots of potential in the professional AR space. The FOV is not a thing but having accurate positioning and 'good enough' AR is. Think of construction engineers using hololens onsite for displaying most of their data.

If you listen to Satya's mission he couldn't be more spot on. Microsoft doesn't need to be a competitor to Google, Apple or Amazon.

Building a truly intelligent cloud e.g. analytics as a service that makes AWS/iCloud look like toys and focusing on reinventing day to day home and office workflows is their strength, the future and still poorly serviced.

Their acquisition of Sunrise and Wunderlist shows they have the sense to recognise their weaknesses and acquihire if need be.

> They have no plays in the key future markets of identity/social, app

They have recently released a social meetup app called Tossup..... It's only available for iOS and Android though! ;-}

They're still good here in Europe. In some countries WP is outselling iPhones and is second in line behind Samsung (CZ)

What about skype?

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