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Microsoft Has Cancelled the Second-Gen HoloLens, Working on Third-Gen For 2019 Launch (thurrott.com)
Citing several unnamed sources, long-time blogger Brad Sams is reporting that Microsoft has canceled the second iteration of the HoloLens in an attempt to focus on even more advanced HoloLens. The company, he says, now plans to launch that third iteration of HoloLens in 2019. From the report: Back when the first version of HoloLens came out, Microsoft created a roadmap that highlighted several release points for the product. This isn't unusual, you start with the first device, second generation devices are typically smaller and more affordable and then with version three you introduce new technology that upgrades the experience; this is a standard process path in the technology sector. Microsoft, based on my sources, is sidelining what was going to be version two of HoloLens and is going straight to version three. By skipping what was version two on their roadmap, the company can accelerate version three which will be closer to a generational leap and help keep Microsoft ahead of the competition. My sources are telling me that this version of HoloLens will not arrive until 2019.
So the Windows 10 naming strategy?
DOA. with another multi-billion dollar "writedown".
Until it was ready for release. It's just bad product management to tease products that aren't ready for release yet, solve the main problems behind locked doors first.
I get that this is marketing, and it sounds better with 3.0 than a 2.0 version.
:)
But come on... it's not like they made a 2.0 already. They are experimenting, that is what 1.xx is for. Next release should be 2.0, IMHO.
Anyway. Not uncommon, and there are a few other issues with higher priorities on earth today
Ya gotta admit, it's pretty fucking innovative to cancel the product before it's even launched.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
No matter how good v3 is going to be in 2 years, v4, in 4 years will be much, much better. With this logic, there's really no reason to release. Ever.
Unless, of course, the team really has just been surfing the internet and going to to lunch and then straight to the bar afterwards for the past 2 years instead of working on product.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Could the intern who taped/stapled/glued the Ad on the top of slashdot (Classic view) please be given time to learn Javascript/css?
Looks likes something from early dot-com. It makes the page behave oddly and annoyingly (on all my devices, but more so on iphone).
MS is famous for half-baked 1.0 releases. Nice to see them slow down and get things working right before asking people to hand over their money. It's true that perfect is the enemy of good, but crappy is everybody's enemy.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Like the iPhone that was only for right-handed users?
I don't know if MS ever published any numbers, but it looks like the first version was targeted mostly at developers, which makes sense. You pay for the hardware and you get a jump start in producing a software product for it, without waiting for a general release. That's not at all unusual and is actually a good thing. It sounds like they were doing parallel development with version two and version three at different points in the development life cycle. If two had issues that couldn't be worked out in a reasonable amount of time doesn't it make sense to drop the release and focus on the next one? These things happen with large, cutting edge projects. At least MS is trying to innovate, there hasn't been much new from Apple other than the "courage" of removing every port possible from their devices.
I mean, like, where did Windows 2.0 ever go?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I would be pretty pissed off as a developer if I poured money into a dev kit thinking this thing might actually hit the market anytime soon.
well to be fair, the hololens is such a difficult instrument, only a few people in the whole universe can master it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A strategy that Gaben never heard of. xD
Anyways, I'm not sure if this is the right move. I can understand why it happens, but the thing is that the first reveal of the Hololens happened in what feels like ages ago, and with no updates in between, people might just forget about it.
But more importantly, it's quite likely that the competition will step up their game and come up with something before 2019.
Then again, I'm not entirely sure how the state of key components are these days, so perhaps it's just a better strategy to wait for them to evolve to release a fully realized product.
When we have advanced further into flexible transparent OLED technology, flexible batteries and electronic components, plus a few other things - and can finally shove everything needed in the form factor of regular glasses, then I can see it becoming a fully fledged mainstream market potential product. So perhaps it's just better for Microsoft to wait. They'll have to restart the marketing strategy once again though.
Back in the day, nobody would touch a Microsoft product until it got to version 3 and had most of the fatal bugs worked out.
Maybe this is a sign of confidence in the product from MS.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So much this. I was actually really excited for the HoloLens, then I got to try it at a trade show. Excitement gone. The concept is awesome, but the product itself just isn't there yet. The gesture recognition was good, but the viewing area was tiny and hard to see, not to mention the headpiece is unwieldy and almost painful to wear even for a few minutes. I really want to like the HoloLens, it's just so bad right now.
It's just bad product management to tease products that aren't ready for release yet
No it's not. It is nothing more than a business strategy. It has upsides and downsides. For example by teasing a product you can build hype for your version thus diminishing the first mover advantage a competitor may have to the market place. By not announcing until release day you can catch a market by surprise which gives you a huge first mover advantage, however you need to rely on inspired fandom to provide you initial interest.
Both are sound business strategies that are highly dependent on the product and the market being entered. To say either way is bad in general really just means you don't understand business strategy.
Release? Who wants to release? We're just announcing something forever so nobody else bothers to build one or if they do, nobody buys it because they're waiting for the Microsoft one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The first company to give me an A.I. in A.R. in the shape of bunny-girl cassette girl wins.
#DeleteFacebook
Not only did you pay a goddamn fortune for your AR headset, it's now obsolete times two.
Yep, agreed. But consider what the first cell phones looked like both in form factor and feature set when compared to modern smartphones, and you can see some pretty amazing potential. At some point in the future, it's likely they'll be able to shrink the form factor down to a lightweight set of glasses, which will be a pretty amazing experience. That's probably the point at which this will stop being a niche product. There are a ton of really cool potential uses for ubiquitous AR glasses you can wear around. But no one wants to walk around with a Spaceman Spiff helmet on their heads while doing so.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I think this is bullshit. This isn't "We're skipping 2 and going straight for 3", this is "2 sucks, and we need to work on it more, so we're going to keep working on it and what we were going to call v2 is now called v3 since it conveniently slots into v3 release cycle"
horse shit lies, lol
Ya, that part about putting the device on your head looks complicated. Maybe someone could design a robotic machine to place the device on ones head?
No matter how good v3 is going to be in 2 years, v4, in 4 years will be much, much better.
Here's the problem though - if v2 ended up just being an incremental upgrade of the dev units, that just was not anywhere good enough compared to shipping VR units, or potentially shipping VR units...
It makes a ton more sense to keep refining not until something is perfect, but until basically it is "good" as in good enough to release for consumers. I can defiantly see why v2 might not have been close enough to good to release, though 2019 is a surprisingly long time for a v3 to arrive... there must be some hardware aspects they need developed a lot more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except we are talking about Microsoft so the 2019 version will have 2016 technology (i.e., it will be low resolution with an annoying screen door effect, nauseous low frame rate).
For VR to be usable beyond 5 minutes of gimicky showing off, the per eye resolution needs to be at 5K and the frame rate at least 120 fps with under 50 millisecond responsiveness.
I doubt we would have those technologies by 2019, we can't get 4K working how are we going to have dual 5K displays rolling at 120 fps by 2019?
well to be fair, the hololens is such a difficult instrument, only a few people in the whole universe can master it.
Well, unless you can score a pair of hands from the Robot Devil - then you'll be able to write great operas and all sorts of stuff!
#DeleteChrome
This, as well as the other VR headset things being teased all over the place, are going to end up with 3D TVs. They certainly aren't necessary for everyday folks, and I don't know that folks even want them.
No it doesn't make sense. If v2.0 is late due to issues, it's still late. Solving the problems, and then calling it v3.0 doesn't hide the fact that is is still just plain old late. This path is the most likely to find v3. also having issues, so wait until 4....without a public release this tech is at real risk of being canned.
I'll go so far as to call it right now: There will not be another release. The project will be rebooted to 'refocus on core synergies' and to 'better align with client needs' .The v1 dev kits will be left to die while they move in a different, incompatible direction.
Anyone who keeps developing for these things is a fool.
Or you can be a company like IBM and be under the 'Consent Decree' which forbade them from talking about products that were further then 90 days from release.
Sure but the first cell phones were actually released to the public. I don;t recall a manufacturer sending out a press release announcing they weren't going to deliver anything. usually, they announced they were delivering new features early, or releasing yet another model. This is bizarre, and coming from MSFT they clearly have no idea what to do this tech, so they should be getting as many lens out the door as possible so someone can discover a great use case. This is the opposite of that...
It seems old habits die hard.
Yep, agreed. But consider what the first cell phones looked like both in form factor and feature set when compared to modern smartphones.
This isn't the first cellphone, it's yet another VR headset. This is much more like Microsoft releasing Windows Phone after nobody really cared about Microsoft's take on the modern smartphone.
Actually, if I had to speculate, I'd wager MS has realized that the tech needs to take a pretty significant leap before it can be considered remotely usable, and so this announcement reflects that consideration. It's likely that version 2 was only a moderate improvement, but had many of the same limitations of version 1. I haven't worn the headset myself, but the near-universal feedback seems to be that while the tech itself is impressive, the experience is like looking through a mail slot, and the headset is uncomfortable to wear. Improving the viewing angle and shrinking the device should be easier in the future as both processing power and battery tech improve.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Call it signed in so we can give you the credit or ridicule you deserve. If v3 is not an incremental step from v2, and is a fundamental architectural shift then you would be wrong. Lotta ifs , but it is possible.
The whiz kids that cobble together the UI for the initial demo with the magic (read fake) engine behind it usually take off once they've gotten their attaboys, leaving another crew of real programmers to actually make a working product, hopefully before the customers tire of playing with the version 1 demoware.
Unfortunately, the real programmers often find that the product does not scale to real work, is completely full of bugs of the worst sort, and needs lots and lots and lots of rework to even approach what was promised, but not delivered.
About that time, upper management brings in another load of whiz kids (named for what they do on software) to cobble together a UI to demo "advanced features" in the successor version. Rinse and repeat Microsoft style.
If the customers are lucky, the real programmers eventually churn out a half-way passable product around v3 or so. If they are lucky...
The tiny viewing area is what ruins it for me as well. Big and bulky I can understand, but a total lack of peripheral vision input is just killing the experience. You're looking around inside a sphere with a window that maybe covers 3% of it (think about it: 45x45 degrees is 1/8 of the horizontal and 1/4 of the vertical, or 1/32 of the whole.) It's a cool toy for looking at specific stuff, but it's far from an immersive experience.
The other thing is it won't be a half baked product. I guarantee that it will be a 5K per eye display rolling at not less than 120fps. In other words, Apple will ensure that any VR or AR headset they release shall have a retina display. A retina VR headset is what Oculus should have been. When Apple makes a their VR headset or glasses, do you honestly think it will have the ultra-annoying screen door effect or puke inducing 90fps? The soul of Steve Jobs will emerge from the grave and smack Tim Cook in the face if that were the case. The whole point is that you can watch an entire movie with the headset on and have it be just like you were sitting in the movie theater. Eventually you will be able to watch live sports in that manner too, except you will be able to virtual teleport to various locations as well on the field and off. In 2020 the Mars Rover will carry a VR camera, so you can experience what it's like sitting on Mars. Does anyone think those experiences can be had with any justice if the frame rate is horrible and the display is marred by the screen door effect ? If there is any of Steve Jobs spirit left at Apple they will remember Steve would throw any sub par VR display across the room with anger (think Steve Ballmer tossing a chair).
But they want developers on board of it already.
Despite the developers not having a market or users to sell to!
2019 is just as good as saying "in the future! with memristors!".
the development suite for hololens 1 is THREE THOUSAND BUCKS. THREE FUCKING THOUSAND BUCKS.
or 5000 bucks if you want warranty and basic mdm that you would get for free on a 99 bucks android phone.
2019 is just as same as saying they're just waiting for some prices to come down. but it makes it almost totally utterly pointless to buy the devkit for 3000 bucks now, given that an user version of the same thing is 2 years away(at least) and might not have _anything_ to do with the devkit!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
By the time they're done refining it the R&D budget will be so massive that they'll have to sell it at prices nobody but the extremely well off will be able to afford anyway.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Microsoft will be shamed into not calling HoloLens "holographic", because it's NOT. Stupid media have echoed Microsoft's marketing lingo without any thought.
It's not a VR headset, it's an AR headset. Confusing them is like calling a cellphone "yet another telephone" and comparing it to a century-long history of landline telephones.
That doesn't mean there's no other AR headset out there, but it's really not a crowded field at this time.
The first version was so expensive and technically flawed that it's hard to see who it was targeted for. The Oculus Rift dev kits cost $350, the HoloLens cost $3000. Regardless of the technical complexity that accounted for that price difference, it still doomed the headset.
Someone within Microsoft finally got the memo that you should never, ever, buy anything from Microsoft until version three...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Microsoft has apparently invented such a stinker of a product that better is actually worse.
In almost every case, as Gabriel's classic observation holds, it is better to get something out on the market fast rather than try to make it technically superior. The only obvious reason to cancel the second-generation Hololens is that it is fundamentally not ready for prime time, and would make the Microsoft and Hololens brands look worse if people saw them.
If Apple built a Hololens we'd never hear about it
Until it was ready for release. It's just bad product management to tease products that aren't ready for release yet, solve the main problems behind locked doors first.
What if that very "keep everything secret" strategy prevents Apple from building highly experimental products like a HoloLens in the first place.
What a useless paragraph, no information about what the 2nd version was going to be or what to look forward to with the 3rd. Instead 5 sentences all repeating that Microsoft is skipping the 2nd for the 3rd. Lame.
Explains the articles that's come out about Apple doing AR stuff internally.
AR vs VR. Apples vs oranges.
Regardless, it was stillborn because it was prohibitively expensve. And not very good for all the tech either.
Release? Who wants to release? We're just announcing something forever so nobody else bothers to build one or if they do, nobody buys it because they're waiting for the Microsoft one.
No, I think it is more along the lines of "We're bumping up the revision number for no good reason". The first lesson I learned in IT was that you never buy v1 of ANYTHING Microsoft.
I don't think it's the price so much as the narrowed field of view. They cut some corners there presumably to save on costs. I would have bought into it if not for that, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
THREE THOUSAND BUCKS. THREE FUCKING THOUSAND BUCKS.
Um, that's pocket change for a company wanting to do some early prototyping or experimental work. Do you really think a company is going to balk at a device that costs less than a week's salary for one of their programmers? These kinds of things take years to develop anyhow. The display tech will change, but it's definitely not too early to start establishing early designs and best practices, and getting familiar with the APIs and dev environment. Those are not likely to change all that much.
BTW, in the game industry, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than what one normally pays for console dev kits before the consoles launch. I recall hearing numbers around $10-20K per kit for the last several generations. And you have to be established industry players to even get the privilege of buying them. So, this isn't all that unusual.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yea, but no product release thats the point. Both companies have pressure from the outside to show they are doing something in VR/AR, but Apple has always (since Jobs return) had the discipline to not ship products until they were ready. A couple articles with minor leaks doesn't change that, Apple has done no public demos. So either those leaks were corporate blessed to calm down analysis's, or just random employee leaks.
The best example is the iPad. It was actually ready for production but canceled by Jobs last minute because he didn't think it was a good enough product. Instead he sent the team back to see if they could take their ideas and make a phone out of it, and we got the iPhone instead. When the iPhone became a success, the team was allowed to go back and redo the iPad, and only then did Jobs deem it ready for the market.
An example that that mentality is still strong in product marketing at Apple would be the Apple Watch. Whether you think it was a finished product or not (it definitely had rough edges), it was a successful one ($6B+ first year sales, probably 10x the rest of the smartwatch market combined, biggest watch launch ever). Very little was leaked before it's launch other than the idea Apple was working on a watch.
Look at my other comment about the nearly 10 year development time line Jobs had for the iPad, and how he canceled it at least once and had the team start over. You can do lots of highly experimental products without releasing them, and keep going back to redo them and make them better.
Jobs was also paranoid about any innovations they came up with not being leaked to competitors, which I think is a reasonable fear. The iPhone was the first touchscreen phone to actually work well because of a lot of little innovations like proximity sensing that made it possible to confidently make phone calls without accidentally launching other apps with your cheek. Once someone sees that it's "duh obvious" to rip that off and get it their products. Why announce/show/launch 2 years early when the product isn't as good, and everyone gets to see all your best ideas before you are able to polish them and make the product as good as it needs to be?
It's the same process that produced the iPod, iPhone and iPad. And ironically Apple is know for how frugal and efficient it's R&D spending is. Or how underfunded it's R&D is, from the perspective of analysts focused on comparing that line item in their income statements to other public companies.
The truth is Apple has proven it knows how to build quality consumer products at the right price points. Even post jobs, the Apple Watch, priced at surprisingly high price points, had higher revenues than probably any watch in history it's first year, and more revenues than the iPhone did it's first year. It had lots of competition from cheaper, less capable smartwaches, but sales results say Apple hit the sweet spot of what customers wanted.
And Apple hasn't had a significant product flop since the Newton, which pre-dated Job's return and entire restructuring of product development and R&D. It's product development process is the best in the hardware side of the business (it's web services on the other hand...).
You said it better than I did.
I'm building my own startup and I think about Jobs' demanding attention to detail every day, especially when I think about half-assing how a feature works. I always realize that the customer isn't going to know or care about my need to get to market ASAP, if I half-ass it they are just going to say "this doesn't work right" or worse "this doesn't work at all", so I go the extra mile to polish and make it work intuitively and well.
I agree with you there is a business strategy reason for pre-announcing, but it doesn't make your product better, it's just an attempt to freeze sales of competitors, and I don't think it works except in very special circumstances. For the market to care, you have to announce something that is going to be better/cheaper, and you have to have a track record in that space of delivering quality products.
Microsoft has no VR/AR track record, there isn't a VR/AR market to speak of, it has a track history of announcing then canceling products (every tablet ever until the Surface), of shipping disappointing first release products (every product ever including the Surface and Xbox), etc. Pre-announcing Hololens is giving away every innovative idea to competitors well ahead of launch, even ahead of fixing the problems with the product.
Microsoft has massive resources, it can silently develop hololens for years until it's truly ready, and when it launches it will make a big splash. No one needed to be teased about the iPod.
but it doesn't make your product better
Never said it did.
and I don't think it works except in very special circumstances. For the market to care, you have to announce something that is going to be better/cheaper, and you have to have a track record in that space of delivering quality products.
Yes, yes, and no. There are plenty of studies that have shown you don't need a good track record of delivery to still sway a market off your competitor. Sometimes it's not even a strategy to sell your product but simply to delay sales of a competitor's product. It's why it is still a viable and very widely used textbook strategy.
No one needed to be teased about the iPod
And there was a strategic reason for that too. Being teased about the iPod gave up an advantage Apple had: a) surprise, and b) unique design. Strategy is also not at all dependent on the company, just like the Surface Book effectively appeared over night, and an iPhone 5 was conveniently left in the bar and dominated the media right as Samsung released the S3.
Business strategy is highly product and situational dependent. It has nothing to do with what people need to hear about, or which company is making the product.