Last December, Microsoft announced that it was abandoning the Windows Mixed Reality platform. Therefore, support for this technology and glasses manufactured by Acer, HP, Asus, Lenovo Dell or Samsung is disappearing. After diving into this space in 2017, Microsoft decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.

Probably, worst time to leave.

This was evidenced by the launch of Apple’s mixed reality glasses Vision Pro, once again suggesting a future in which many more people will use such devices for both work and entertainment. Looks like it would be harder to carry them on the street, yes.

This launch also refocused the focus on Meta and its (over)reliance on metadata. Even Mark Zuckerberg finally gave his opinion on Vision Pro and stated that Meta Quest 3 is a better product.

Meta, whose software offering is currently disappointing – except in some cases – already has a long history in the development of virtual reality hardware. The acquisition of Oculus, now obsolete as a brand, allowed the company to continue and strengthen that bet, and although its products still didn’t work very well, Apple’s offer revived things.

Bill Gates happily poses with a Microsoft Tablet PC in November 2001. The iPad was almost a decade away from proving the concept made sense.

So what’s the latest situation at Microsoft? The company appeared to be launching its mixed reality platform, which it soon put on the backburner. but with your HoloLensThree generations later this too was cancelled.

These mixed reality glasses, which were almost a “proto-Vision-Pro”, offered some of the features we currently see in Apple glasses. Mixing our reality with virtual reality objects and scenarios had potentially interesting applications, but things didn’t work out. Because?

probably because Microsoft came at the wrong time.

In fact, what happened with HoloLens and mixed reality glasses is something that Microsoft has experienced more in the past. They seem to (almost) always arrive at the party too early.

Of course it happened to them too with smartphones. When Apple announced the iPhone, Microsoft had already tried and given up on starting its own revolution in the mobile world.

Their initiative was called Windows Mobile; It was a project that started in 2000 (although some of the work was already done with Windows CE) and it certainly promised great things. I know this because “I was there”: I attended a Microsoft press tour in 2002 and held an Orange SPV 200 terminal, which was absolutely amazing for the time.

Microsoft tried to make this work for a while but failed. Successive versions of Windows Mobile have always hit the same wall: Trying to adapt desktop Windows to mobile has never been completely successful. This is very interesting because Apple has achieved exactly this with the OS X-based iPhone, as Steve Jobs said in the presentation.

They never managed to see their bets pay off in Redmond, but added to their tendency to come in too early: They were late too. They did this with Windows Phone and especially Windows 10 Mobile, and the great idea of ​​universal or Continuum apps, but neither fit.

At Microsoft, they soon reached tablets (Microsoft Tablet PC, 2001) and folding devices (Microsoft Courier, 2009). In both cases, these projects turned into products with mixed success: The Microsoft Surface family managed to create a new format of PCs (convertibles) from scratch, with more than moderate success. Things haven’t gone so well for foldables: the Surface Neo hasn’t even been released yet, and the Surface Duo has been a massive flop.

But as we said, Microsoft was late to a few parties, too. This happened with the iPod (poor Zune), search engines (poor Bing, now criticized in favor of Copilot), or social networks, which it never competed with except for overlooked projects like So.cl.

Too many battles have been lost. Some because they came too early, some because they came too late, and some because they didn’t know how to take advantage of this opportunity. Skype, for example, is and should have been what Zoom eventually became, but at least the folks here from Redmond reacted in a timely manner with Teams.

However, it should also be noted that Microsoft has learned from its mistakes, especially with the arrival of current CEO Satya Nadella in 2013. With this came a complete focus on the cloud, which became the main source of its revenue, as well as a commitment to artificial intelligence and OpenAI, which is now paying off.

But still Microsoft continues to deliver many things at the wrong time. Of course, this happens to other companies, but it’s especially shocking when it comes to a company like Microsoft, which has been leading the technology industry for over 50 years. At this point, we might think that they shouldn’t be so wrong about the times.. And they continue to do so.

in Xataka | Vision Pro reminds us of 2001, 2007 and 2014: the first generation does not bode well for the future