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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

#181

Post by ajmurmann »

p1mrx wrote: post #55
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…

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 think there is a huge amount of areas that are less visible to technologists that are underserved. I sometimes think about either partnering or purchasing a small business and just automating the shit out of it. You either become dominant die to the advantage or you start selling the software to competitors. This was mostly spawned by observing a friend's struggles with his property management company while we were on vacation together. Everything they fucked up or for which he had to make phone calls to them could have been triviality automated.

I bet there are lots of sectors out there that could be totally disrupted or made more efficient if they got attention from high-caliber developers and UX folks.

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

#183

Post by mdorazio »

avsteele wrote: post #158

I really wanted to use HoloLens for remote support. Too bad they never really looked like they would support it for wider use. We are a small company that sells very complex equipment to labs around the world. The users are smart / PhDs, they just need to be told what to do to fix things when they need an adjustment. This is large physical scientific equipment and the stuff requires 'hands-on'.

Why would you need a HoloLens for that instead of something much cheaper and easier to wear like a Vuzix M400?

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

#184

Post by 9WwFaLaTtBDaoS »

gpm wrote: post #169
dougmwne wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#185

Post by 9WwFaLaTtBDaoS »

elif wrote: post #120
mbfg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't disagree, i find it interesting that people get unbelievably angered when individuals record them in public, but could care less when business do. I could understand some difference in reaction between the two, but the actual gulf displayed is astounding.

The pizza place's security camera isn't going to prank me or ask me about a sensitive topic and then same day blast my reaction on 7 vertical format video platforms as an out of context meme with sensationally misleading captions.

[dead]

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

#186

Post by abdabab »

mynameisnull wrote: post #179
threadweaver34 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s anecdotal but, I’ve personally known multiple high 200-400k a year earners who went bankrupt or near bankrupt over only medical bills. I myself nearly did. The cost of catastrophic situations is still ultimately too high in the US without or with insurance.

I thought health insurance puts a cap on how much you can get charged. Could you add a little how that can happen?

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

#187

Post by bruce511 »

harimau777 wrote: post #165
mjr00 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and no. Its helpful to see the word "startup" as meaning two distinct things.

The "current" use of the word implies VC capital. As in "I joined a startup and we raised..."

However in the past it referred to literally "starting a business". Someone sees a gap in the market, builds a product, and looks to fill that gap one customer at a time. Since there is no incoming capital, it has to be revenue positive, well enough for the owners to survive.

This sort of business is (somewhat perjorativly) called a "life style" business. In that it provides salaries to some number of people, and provides a (good?) living.

The reasons for starting such a business are numerous, and while maybe some do with the goal of being mega-rich, in reality the successful ones end up being merely "rich".

But there are a _lot_ of upsides other than money. I'll offer a few from personal experience, but really they offer any goal you like.

A) freedom to work on what you want, when you want, where you want, how you want. Yes, of course you are constrained by actually delivering (or you don't get paid) but the mechanics of delivering are up to you.

B) job security. It takes time to get to this point, but once a business is profitable the owner has a job for life. (he is literally the last person to get laid off) [1]

C) a lack of corporate bullshit. No endless layers of managers. No endless meetings. If you need a new PC you go buy a new PC. (equally true, if you report directly to the owner, decisions get made quickly. If you need a new PC you only have to convince one person.)

D) while on the topic, being employed by a small business has huge benefits as well, but to need to move the income needle for the job security.

I could go on but I think you get the point.

[1] ironically when getting person credit, like a mortgage, ticking "self employed" leads me to a lower credit score, despite the fact that 40-odd people get laid off before I do :)

[2] about 5% of new (bootstrapped) businesses make it to 10 years old. I'm not suggesting this route is easy, but it is desirable.

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

#188

Post by h0l0cube »

polio wrote: post #130
h0l0cube wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more that the industry is bearish on long bets in a tight financial climate. The tech for VR/AR is too clunky to seamlessly integrate into peoples' daily lives like mobile phones and smart phones did. There will need to be an iPhone-like leap in affordable and portable vision tech before VR/AR becomes a feasible marketplace.

VR will always be more of a destination, whereas the vision for AR is that it'll integrate with your daily life via a wearable.

When display technology has miniaturised and matured, and the requisite wireless bandwidth is deployed at scale, you won’t need two different devices

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

#189

Post by dragonwriter »

abdabab wrote: post #186
mynameisnull wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s anecdotal but, I’ve personally known multiple high 200-400k a year earners who went bankrupt or near bankrupt over only medical bills. I myself nearly did. The cost of catastrophic situations is still ultimately too high in the US without or with insurance.

I thought health insurance puts a cap on how much you can get charged. Could you add a little how that can happen?

> I thought health insurance puts a cap on how much you can get charged.

Instead of annual out-of-pocket maximums that are mandatory under the ACA and make that unlikely, plans used to have kind of the reverse: lifetime coverage caps that particularly severe conditions could exceed. (This is one of the reasons premiums are higher for superficially similar—e.g., what services are covered and at what cost sharing rule befoee reaching caps—coverage under the ACA.)

I can't see how it can happen post-ACA, unless the condition as a practical matter requires services that are entirely outside the scope of coverage.

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