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Killed by Microsoft

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Re: Killed by Microsoft

#331

Post by WorldMaker »

chrisdirkis wrote: post #214
johnnyanmac wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Kinect => It's not dead ??? Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense. Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other tea…

The Azure Kinect was released as a successor for the research and business applications[1]. I know one roboticist who has used one, but no one aside from that. Definitely dead as a consumer gaming device, but a product evolving towards a discovered usecase is a surprisingly happy outcome from MS. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/kinect-dk/

Also a lot of the sensors that Kinect brought to market first and a lot of very Kinect-like sensor packages have just made their way into mainstream usage. Any device with "Face ID" or "Windows Hello" support owes a lot to Kinect and uses a comparable sensor package to the first gen Xbox 360 Kinect (though usually a much shorter depth of field because it's just doing facial recognition rather than full room recognition).

You can buy USB cameras from Intel and Logitech with comparable sensor packages to a Kinect.

For Microsoft's hardware efforts that is often seen as its own win when they can take something people don't know they need, package it in a commodity way to get competitors to take interest and build their own versions:

The scroll wheel on the mouse went from an R&D project at Microsoft to the Office team realizing it was the future of productivity and bundling mice with scroll wheels with Office to now just about no manufacturer would think to build a mouse without a scroll wheel.

The Kinect used console gaming as a trojan horse to commoditize thousands of dollars of lab sensors into an integrated $150 accessory to the Xbox 360 and now there are versions of that sensor package in laptops and smartphones and VR headsets and so much more. Kinect as a gaming brand may be dead (for now? AR/MR gaming has always been one for recurring fads, it may come around again, who knows), but the legacy of Kinect lives on in hardware all around us. The hardware didn't just go back to being thousands of dollars of lab equipment, it became part of the computing atmosphere around us. That's an incredibly interesting and weird win that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily credit Microsoft for being such a lever, such an instigator of change/innovation, such a bridge between R&D dreams and "background" reality.

(ETA: Microsoft still sometimes uses the IntelliMouse brand as a bit of a retro-throwback, but the above analogy does help show how much that brand is very related to the Kinect brand. Almost every mouse today is an "IntelliMouse" under the original brand meaning. The brand did its job so successfully to point where people don't even sometimes remember the brand, other than sometimes retro-hardware fans.)

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#332

Post by WorldMaker »

joshuamorton wrote: post #202
DoctorOW wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your example disproves more than it proves. The difference between Micrsoft Edge and Edge Chromium was that one day you launched the browser and it looked/worked a little different. Using Google for chat on the other hand is still extremely difficult because there is no clear path (as indicated by all your question marks) who is to migrate where and when they're supposed to do it.

This isnt really true though. For the main use case (IM and VC), Gchat -> hangouts -> chat/meet is pretty straightforward. Heck most people probably didn't notice the migration happening!

Define "most people"?

Average Android users, maybe had a clean migration?

On iOS (or worse Windows) you had to seek out new apps each time and there was nothing but confusion. Both platforms, at least in the US, have more than their fair share to be considered statistically significant to "most people" and "I need to find and install some new app" is certainly much more friction than "didn't notice the migration happening".

(Not to mention anecdotally, my GChat experience was through XMPP federation and was amazing while it lasted and I entirely got stranded by the "migration" to Hangouts. Everything including my contacts list was in XMPP. I know that I'm statistically insignificant to Google in that transition and statistically insignificant to "most people", but I also wasn't the only person stranded that way.)

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#333

Post by WorldMaker »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #278
kerng wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Microsoft is really good at back compatibility - sometimes even to a fault. It also seems Microsoft sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service. Compare that to Google and Android for instance... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.

Agreed. Google is really good at back compatibility - sometimes even to a fault. It also seems Google sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service. Compare that to Microsoft and Windows Phone for instance, or UWP, or even Windows... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.

During Windows Phone's lifetime devices were rarely left un-upgraded or out of security support. Not quite as well as iOS, but much better than the Android situation. Arguably it was one of the reasons that phone carriers chose to kill Windows Phone because they seem to like being able to micromanage the tire fire that is Android Updates and Windows Phone was too "uppity" for them.

UWP isn't "dead" and its technologies continue to get updated.

Windows' left behind devices that no longer receive security updates are after at least a decade of active security support. XP was offered several lifelines, way beyond the security support of any single Android version in the history of Android. Windows 7 seems on the path to similar lifelines and maybe won't have quite the same record of security support, but will still see active security patches for much longer than any Android version could imagine.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#334

Post by aksss »

Semaphor wrote: post #269
aksss wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Teams came out it didn’t have feature parity with SfB, despite their claims that it did, but here in 2022, it does. At least I can’t think of a sing feature in SfB that’s not in Teams now, and can think of many features that have been radically improved. Never used consumer Skype too much, what are you missing in Teams now?

SfB saved conversations to outlook, that way it had a great search. Unless I’m missing something, Teams does not do that, and the built-in search is a complete joke (you get single message results with no way to read all the context).

My experience with the saved convos in Outlook from SfB was kinda hit or miss, but you're totally right. Teams doesn't even try. Or I suppose, Teams does store your chat history in the mailbox, but it's not in a folder that's user accessible anymore. I'm sure reasons include driving users to the Teams interface. But it then begs the question about why I still have that empty folder in my mailbox structure.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#335

Post by WorldMaker »

bluescrn wrote: post #186
r3trohack3r wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My oldest kid is just aging into gaming. We’ve got the Disneyland Adventures game and a Kinect for her. Can confirm, Kinect is dead. You can only get them refurbished now, they’re no longer manufactured. The new consoles no longer support Kinect, we had to dig out an original Xbox One for her. When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers. Without dev…

> When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers Developers generally disliked it. It just didn't work well as a game controller. The Wii was much more practical. You still had a controller in your hand with physical buttons, which makes a big difference, and it worked as a fairly accurate pointing device. Those more than made up for the limitations of…

In the early Xbox One days there was a lot of experiments with hybrid controls where you'd still have the controller in your hand, with its accurate joysticks and physical buttons, but have the Kinect sensor for body posture and facial expression and gestures out and away from the controller (and voice recognition). The SDKs had a bunch of interesting things about controller recognition matched to other data. The OS itself would do things like pick out which controller a specific person was holding, and could use that for sign in (among other things). The Xbox One dropped the "controller number ring" from the 360 because it could tell what person was holding the controller rather than needing to signal vice versa which controller a person should hold. There were some interesting Kinect party games that took advantage of this or nearly took advantage of this (hybrid games where maybe everyone would set down controllers for a mini-game and it wouldn't matter that everyone picked up "the right" controller back when the next controller section started).

In the end, couch coop that was pretty essential to the 360 just kind of withered away in the Xbox One era (when games like Halo competing on looks with other consoles decided they couldn't afford the frames/resolution costs of split-screen coop anyway) and that missing "controller number indicator" no longer mattered in the end, but in the original plans of the Xbox One the hybrid Kinect/controller gaming support was key to things like couch coop.

It's still interesting to wonder about that road not taken if more developers had considered Xbox One hybrid Kinect/controller controls more seriously beyond just the few experiments we did see.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#336

Post by WorldMaker »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #224
tryptophan wrote: post #16

Wunderlist is still alive as Microsoft todo though isn't it?

Wunderlist was acquired and killed because it would have been better than Microsoft Todo. They promised to implement a few features and pocketed some customers.

Microsoft Todo was started by the Wunderlist team. It was a ground up rewrite for whatever reasons made sense to that team at the time, but Todo didn't exist until after the Wunderlist acquisition.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#338

Post by kungito »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #217
kungito wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets be honest, no Microsoft messaging platform had a chance to be a 2022 whatsapp/messenger competitor. They were smart to realise that and focused on their Slack alternative for businesses which they can package with the rest of Office package. And with the new EU regulation on the way it makes even less sense

It would have had a chance if they didn't screw up MSN and Skype which were both incredibly successful communication tools among teens and 20 something. Everybody was on MSN. Everybody was on Skype. Once whatsapp and facebook messenger mobile started taking place it was already N years too late. Now in 2022, they have no chance.

But that is not Microsoft's target market. They sell business oriented productivity tools. Only recently have they started having a consumer oriented gaming products which is still a small list of products around Xbox console platform

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#339

Post by harry8 »

zokier wrote: post #199
harry8 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wut? N900 was the best, most reliable, highest quality and most polished phone I have ever owned. It's not even close. How they f.ed that up is beyond me.

N900 was really cool device in many ways, but polished or reliable it definitely was not; when I had one, I tended to carry a feature phone along with it because N900 was so ridiculously buggy and unreliable.

Until I lost mine in a taxi it was easily the best, most polished and most reliable phone I've ever owned. More reliable than any iPhone I've owned. More reliable than any droid I've owned. In terms of calls connecting, not dropping out, the OS not crashing in the middle of calls - all of which have happened to me with Apple and Google's (Samsung's) gear. That was my experience that I'm having as hard a time reconciling with yours as you probably are with mine.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#340

Post by Thorrez »

syshum wrote: post #323
Rebelgecko wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Nexus 6 cost $50 more than the Pixel 6 does, even before you take inflation into account

The Nexus 6P has the same spec's as the FlagShip Pixel for 1/2 the price

6P was $500, Pixel 1 was $650, Pixel 1 XL was $750.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9410551/google-nexus-6p-a...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-...

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