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Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

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Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#161

Post by threadweaver34 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #148
javajosh wrote: post #31

It's funny I keep thinking about how the same people might work on the same thing but with different terms. As a W2 employee you make great money, but your upside is capped. Your downside is never capped, of course. As a founder you make okay money, you have better upside. But the same corp that fired you will invest that money with the VC that funded you. So, either way, the capital flows through the corp to you, an…

Startups will be out of reach of many in the US until we have a much more robust baseline of public services. First and foremost being health insurance of course. I would love to start the kind of lifestyle (or "non-scaling" as you put it) business, but right now it's a complete non-starter for me because getting a health insurance policy for my entire family would be comically expensive. It's even been harder for me…

6 months of FAANG severance is better than 2 years of government social safety net, even with a good government.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#162

Post by killjoywashere »

mjr00 wrote: post #35
javajosh wrote: post #31

It's funny I keep thinking about how the same people might work on the same thing but with different terms. As a W2 employee you make great money, but your upside is capped. Your downside is never capped, of course. As a founder you make okay money, you have better upside. But the same corp that fired you will invest that money with the VC that funded you. So, either way, the capital flows through the corp to you, an…

I agree. I think the next 5-10 years will see a massive wave of new companies come out of this. There's been so much talent locked up in bigtech for so long. The amount of talent in these companies that have had golden handcuffs forever due to the continual rise of their stock grants is staggering. Now suddenly bigtech stock is down 50%+, and they can't issue enough RSUs to cover the compensation gap. Moreover, there…

So far we're looking at ~200,000 layoffs, a far cry from the 1,000,000 laid off in the dot-com bubble. And nowhere close to the capital bonfire of the 2008 housing collapse.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#164

Post by dougmwne »

tessierashpool wrote: post #132
generalizations wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and you can leave at any time

"if people are trying to chase you away, you can always leave." not a solution per se

Or mute them, which is an excellent solution.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#165

Post by harimau777 »

mjr00 wrote: post #84
p1mrx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it seems most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked over the last couple decades. What is left for a random small business with software talent to do?

I actually strongly disagree -- the amount of business potential for software that isn't trying to becoming a billion-dollar unicorn is massive, and has been extremely underserved during the past decade as most of the money (and talent) chased after the billion dollar moonshot bets, either in B2C businesses or very generic B2B software (think Atlassian). It's harder to find the business potential because the opportun…

Isn't the opportunity to make "fuck you money" the motivation for the risk of working as a startup? Without that people are probably better off working at a corp.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#166

Post by javajosh »

propogandist wrote: post #77
mjr00 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think the next 5-10 years will see a massive wave of new companies come out of this. There's been so much talent locked up in bigtech for so long. The amount of talent in these companies that have had golden handcuffs forever due to the continual rise of their stock grants is staggering. Now suddenly bigtech stock is down 50%+, and they can't issue enough RSUs to cover the compensation gap. Moreover, there…

Many startups that launched in the last several years did not have a proper business model, were not profitable and were reliant on VC money. It was all about growing quickly enough to get to IPO to give early investors liquidity and dump the liability on general public (like Uber). As free/cheap money goes away it should force entrepreneurs to build real businesses rather than VC fueled money pits.

That's the hope!

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#167

Post by skohan »

troymc wrote: post #136
skohan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems obvious to me AI will be the next major disruption. Radically decreasing the need for human labor has an obvious productive advantage while there is no evidence people would prefer to leave reality.

Headsets might be a niche market, but "leaving reality" is a huge market if you count video games, movies, TV, novels, short stories, plays, musicals, ... There's a story I love to recount on this topic. A dad asked his kid why they preferred reading books to watching movies. The kid said, "because they have better pictures." (And yes, AI can write stories, so the markets aren't orthogonal.)

Yeah fair enough, but I still think "wearing something on your face will be one of the main modes of media consumption" is far from a safe bet.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#168

Post by skohan »

netheril96 wrote: post #160
skohan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems obvious to me AI will be the next major disruption. Radically decreasing the need for human labor has an obvious productive advantage while there is no evidence people would prefer to leave reality.

Except AI plays to the strengths of Big Companies rather than small ones. So MAGA will be the first to capture the winds of AI. They don’t have to worry about an unknown AI company suddenly toppling them upside down.

I agree - I think the existing big tech firms will "own the means of production" with AI, which currently depend on expensive hardware infrastructure.

What remains to be seen is which disruption happens through the use of AI, which seems much more up for grabs.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#169

Post by gpm »

dougmwne wrote: post #164
tessierashpool wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if people are trying to chase you away, you can always leave." not a solution per se

Or mute them, which is an excellent solution.

Which is a solution that scales extremely poorly in a global environment with potentially billions of people you might want to mute. More so in an environment which supports anonymity, so that they can just keep creating new accounts.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#170

Post by ch4s3 »

metalspot wrote: post #150
ch4s3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the military actually use them?

no. it was only a test program, and the test was a complete failure. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/microsoft-mixed-real...

Yeah I’m the world of precision artillery and dirt cheap drones a glowing helmet seems unreasonably dumb.
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