Microsoft is discontinuing Windows
oh wow! Time for Microsoft Linux?
Mixed Reality
oh.
Mixed Reality was a very poor product, so I’m not sad to see it go. I just hope Microsoft doesn’t screw owners of headsets that require Windows Mixed Reality for basic functionality.
How was it a poor product? By itself, sure, there wasn’t that many VR apps sold on the Microsoft Store, but once plugged into SteamVR, it was another story. WMR offered headsets for every budgets, from the low end to the very high-end and with more flexibility than HTC’s Vive and Valve’s Index.
but once plugged into SteamVR, it was another story
This was the core of why it was a poor product. It’s only job was to pop up, annoy the user, while the user figured out how to minimize it to get to SteamVR.
WMR offered headsets for every budgets
If WMR was simply drivers or optional software it would have been fine all while still offering headsets for all budgets. Instead WMR is a required software which got in the way of actually using the product one bought.
When one plugs in a keyboard, they don’t want the manufacturer’s software to open on-screen just to use the keyboard, same for mice, same for monitors, same for VR headsets.
Was there even ever any use for it, other than using the headsets on Steam?
There is something that people tend to forget and very clear on what was learned from VR and mixed reality: if they means wearing a device in your head or eyes, it will fail. Technology needs to advance considerable in order to both VR and mixed be adopted into everyone’s life.
Not really, there’s certainly a compromise where glasses level sized tech could be very appealing to a lot of people
Absolutely, if it’s essentially just a pair of regular glasses. Anything bulkier and it becomes fatiguing.
We’re still probably a decade off of AR glasses that size, but they’re getting there.
An entire decade? There are several available to consumers. I’d say 2-3 years maximum for the perfect fit.
Example: https://www.visor.com/
perfect time for linux mint vr
Sometimes I feel like Microsoft is just a little too early to the party. Apple is about to release their VR/AR product and even they do it’s probably going to be crazy and become popular. Then Microsoft will have missed the wave.
The same can be applied to their Windows phones. Had they suck around a bit they would have had a better market share I think.
Dog poo brown and mushy peas green
Charcoal black and spider blood blue
Ice chunk white and transparent glass
Incase you’re wondering what all this is, it’s how I describe the color options of the Zune 30. You can tell that they’re all the same length in terms of syllables.
Microsoft were hardly early to the game with Windows phones, compare BlackBerry or Symbian. They had some early successes, for instance against Palm. The big failure was to keep deprecating the existing version of Windows phone, in some cases many months before the ongoing version was available, and deprecating the existing hardware along with it. Look at the whole mango/tango Windows phone 7 /Windows phone 8 debacle
I was talking about when the modern touchscreen smartphones entered the market. After BlackBerry and Symbian. Microsoft partnered with Nokia to create some pretty nice smartphones that were well equipped. Their UI was really nice, too. It would have been a great competitor to Android phones and Apple’s iPhones had they kept in the game.
The more competition, the better.
Windows Phone’s problem was Steve Balmer, and it was insurmountable. They delayed entering the market for too long and without a large enough user base, there was no way forward to get any real traction in attracting large enough numbers of application developers.
Not enough app developers means dismissal app marketplace means inferior overall user experience relative to Android and iOS, no matter how good the overall hardware or OS was on Windows Phones.
For what it’s worth, Satya shutting it down it wasn’t any better. At least with Balmer, it may still be alive today. It was actually doing pretty well in certain markets in Europe. All of which they threw away very quickly after Satya took over.
I’m not as familiar with Balmer’s time but it sure seems MS under Satya was way more trigger happy when it comes to cancelling and deprecating products.
To be fair, they were pretty ahead of the competition when it came to the hardware specs of their phones. The Lumia 950 released in 2015 and had a 1440p AMOLED screen, 3GBs of RAM, biometric unlocking with an iris scanner, and a pretty incredible camera for the time. It also had a removable back cover and battery as well as an AUX port. It was also the first phone I’d seen with USB-C and wireless charging.
Just listing these makes me a bit nostalgic for WP…
Those last gen windows phones were really good though.
Same with blackberry and their last gen qnx phones. The passport was such a good device.
To further your point, I would add Mixer. Msoft gave up on it just months before Twitch made a series of controversial moves that would have been the perfect moment to strike with an alternative.
I think that part of the difference there is also that Apple is really good at marketing their products into “the cool thing to have” and a status symbol, a lot of their products don’t necessarily gain steam based purely on their functionality but more based on their ability to make it the hottest latest thing to have.
Dude the Mixer situation was so weird to me, they were clearly serious about it, bought out a bunch of big streamers for ridiculous amounts of money and then just… gave up. They needed more ways to engage the community of streamers, like Twitch Rivals does, because people are not going to use your platform if they have no-one they want to watch, but Mixer never attempted to try and get people to watch new streamers.
I did try Mixer when I still watched livestreams often, the video quality was so much better, the player was snappy and was such a breath of fresh air from Twitch. But my god did they butcher the chat/viewer experience. I don’t want visual clutter and fireworks flying over my screen all the time, it was the most dogshit thing ever, so back to Twitch I went. I mean Twitch without FFZ is also disgusting now, give me that simple IRC chat back!
Your comparison between phones and VR/AR is reasonable but a bit different as when windows phones were discontinued, Microsoft had pretty much lost the phone os race. Also the windows phones sucked, I’ve used them…
IMO microsoft gave vr/ar a fair chance. They might have been early, but if we are eg. a full decade off must buy VR, then it might not be worth waiting.
