Zune. Surface RT. Kinect. Windows Phone. Band. Just naming some things that I've personally purchased and Microsoft no longer supports. They are no better than Google at continuing to support their products.
Zune: introduced 2006; discontinued: 2012; support ended 2015 (9 years) Surface RT: introduced: 2012; Discontinued: 2013; Windows support ends 2023 (11 years) Kinect: introduced 2010; discontinued: 2015 for windows; 2017 for xbox; still supported (no date announced AFAICT) Windows phone: introduced: 2010; last release 2015; windows phone os support ended 2017 (7 years) Band: introduced 2014; discontinued 2016; still…
Windows 10 Mobile is supported until December 2019.
[Edit: Disclaimer, I work at MS but not on Surface. I also don't know if there is post-processing applied to the video I linked, so maybe it can't be done realtime.]
For Skype for Business meetings they have a chrome plugin now. It requires you to download an MSI to install. Haven't figured out how to do that in Linux.
Note that Microsoft are in the process of deprecating Skype for Business altogether ( https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16360072/microsoft-teams-... ) in favor of Teams (their Slack-like online tool).
What makes me cringe is the thought of trying to answer the video call which Skype proceeds to drop and you spend 15+ minutes trying to reconnect with the caller which leads to you just using the old fashion conference telephone sitting on the table.
Is business Skype that bad? I gather it was a separate product (Lync) that they later decided to slap a Skype logo on.
We have had pretty good (albeit not perfect) experience with Skype for Business over the last few years. We use it with Office 365 and the Cloud PBX, so we don't have any PBX/POTS or server hardware in our office, and we haven't had many issues with connectivity, especially in the past year or so. The meetings work very well, the PBX functionality works great, presence is a huge plus across all the Office products, and the ability to federate communications and presence with other businesses has been great for our consulting business. And paired with low-cost Polycom phones on the desk, the hardware/software combination is excellent and the value is truly there. It's not without its flaws, though: IMs in particular often get lost when you have multiple devices (i.e. a message goes to your mobile and you don't see it on the desktop), the mobile apps (especially Android) are pretty horrid, and the future of merging with Teams makes things uncertain (although promising).
Wouldn't this require repositioning the person's eyes in the video? Not saying that isn't doable..
No, users look at where the other person is on the screen; not at the camera. So reprojection can be done to a known point of view. IIRC, hololens does some of the reprojection magic already.
It's hurting my brain to think about this. Surely if you aren't looking into the lens then your eyes will not appear as if they are looking at the person since the lens's perspective is the source for the projection on the other side.
Like, if I take a picture of myself with a camera and look directly into the lens then my eyes are pointing directly forward. If I now continue looking at that same point but move the camera up on a step-ladder, the image I am going to get would not have my eyes aligning directly into the camera. How do you get around that?
I would love a Surface Hub, I tried to buy one and couldn't because they were only available to 'qualified' customers (something an individual apparently never could be). Now with 4K (or 8K!) displays it becomes completely credible to replace a white board with one. And the benefits of the shared whiteboard and presence is really solid when working with someone who isn't local. The software infrastructure investment…
> I tried to buy one and couldn't because they were only available to 'qualified' customers You can order one from CDW right now[0]. They did initially only open them up to Microsoft Partners with a certain level, but that was many years ago now. I will say that a Surface Hub is much more useful when used as part of AD/O365. Since Skype for Business is a major selling point and not really useful to the individual. Us…
I _love_ that Microsoft seems to prefer 3:2 displays over 16:9/16:9 displays! If we get really lucky we might even see 4:3 displays again some day in the future.
4:3 displays are too boxy for mobility, I really think 3:2 should be the new standard, especially for tablets, it's just perfect.
I prefer 4:3 for tablets, but I'm glad we can all agree that 16:9 was a mistake. Even 16:10 would have been better as a standard.
I love such devices. However, similiar to smartphones they depend so much on the software, and Microsoft is not too known for interoperability. How can my Linux and Mac OS X colleagues participate and contribute in the meetings? Such tools need open platforms and communities which build them. I'm especially concerned because Microsoft stopped the support for a native Linux Skype client.
teams is a web app and the desktop variant is built on top of electron. you can download it for mac https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads or use teams.microsoft.com on linux.
Wouldn't this require repositioning the person's eyes in the video? Not saying that isn't doable..
I doubt they're doing that, but it can be done realtime. Here's an example that runs in your browser, just move your mouse around and her eyes track it. http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/gaze_dolores.html [Edit: Disclaimer, I work at MS but not on Surface. I also don't know if there is post-processing applied to the video I linked, so maybe it can't be done realtime.]
What makes me cringe is the thought of trying to answer the video call which Skype proceeds to drop and you spend 15+ minutes trying to reconnect with the caller which leads to you just using the old fashion conference telephone sitting on the table.
Is business Skype that bad? I gather it was a separate product (Lync) that they later decided to slap a Skype logo on.
Yes, it is. They're trying to replace it with Teams, though, which is way better.