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MS takes loss after Hololens deal falls through, announces layoffs in the AR department

Hololens 1 was discontinued years ago. Hololens 2 debuted 2019 as a purely enterprise device. The end of MS consumer AR aspirations happened in 2019. Nobody's fault if you don't follow tech news.

Dismissing attempts to educate you as 'astroturfing' is certainly a new low. As is your misuse of that term, since nobody's actually marketing Hololens, AR or even Microsoft in this thread.

From TheVerge, back in 2019:
You are literally an astrotufer working overtime in every thread.

Whatever hololens is or was is irrelevant. MS pulled this shit out at E3 because Sony brought out VR. Gamers can talk about it if they want.
 

azertydu91

Hard to Kill
Taking a loss, fucking maybe don't try to buy Activions for double the price and let people keep the work. Shit like this makes me angry, they are swimming in money and "gotta go plebs"

Also this not even counting their H1B "strategy", but keep boats about your friendly face MS.
What is an h1b strategy?
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
What is an h1b strategy?
Take people from poorer countries to their work force on work visa and as soon as it lapses, just let them go. These people are the reason there is big personal rotation within the MS teams. When you are dropped into place, you have to have time to adjust, which isn't really possible if you have visa for 3,6 months. Also it is hard to complain about anything when your visa resulting in you being fire, means deportation to your home country.
 

Three

Member
Didn't the Pentagon just reorder these?

They had issues with soldiers getting motion sick if memory serves me correct. But that's always gonna be an issue with vr/ar.
They had a task order for an improved version of what they had but Congress rejected the Army's request to order more.
 

Thirty7ven

Banned
Taking a loss, fucking maybe don't try to buy Activions for double the price and let people keep the work. Shit like this makes me angry, they are swimming in money and "gotta go plebs"

Also this not even counting their H1B "strategy", but keep boats about your friendly face MS.

It’s awful and is one of the things that need to change about some of these companies, they have almost no social responsibility to their workers. A company as big and profitable as MS who spends billions on failed endeavors like Mixer and is now spending 70 billions on AB has no business laying off ten thousand workers just so the higher ups get to keep their bonuses while making shareholders happy.

Companies who are swimming in money and posting ridiculous profits should be forced by law to keep their workforce intact and find different ways to grow.
 
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M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
It’s awful and is one of the things that need to change about some of these companies, they have almost no social responsibility to their workers. A company as big and profitable as MS who spends billions on failed endeavors like Mixer and is now spending 70 billions on AB has no business laying off ten thousand workers just so the higher ups get to keep their bonuses while making shareholders happy.

Companies who are swimming in money and posting ridiculous profits should be forced by law to keep their workforce intact and find different ways to grow.
You are very right, what appears to be a good social cause on the surface, is in practice a predatory "movement" how to get cheap expendable workforce, to please lord capitalism. Pretty much all big companies are doing this, however Meta and MS is infamous for it.
 

azertydu91

Hard to Kill
Take people from poorer countries to their work force on work visa and as soon as it lapses, just let them go. These people are the reason there is big personal rotation within the MS teams. When you are dropped into place, you have to have time to adjust, which isn't really possible if you have visa for 3,6 months. Also it is hard to complain about anything when your visa resulting in you being fire, means deportation to your home country.
Thanks, I didn't know about these kind of practises.
 

reksveks

Member
Take people from poorer countries to their work force on work visa and as soon as it lapses, just let them go. These people are the reason there is big personal rotation within the MS teams. When you are dropped into place, you have to have time to adjust, which isn't really possible if you have visa for 3,6 months. Also it is hard to complain about anything when your visa resulting in you being fire, means deportation to your home country.
You got a link for the length of a h1b visa?

My understanding is that it's for 3 years and can get extended to 6 years.

There is alot of shitty things that MS does including contracting and laying people off during massive profits. Using oversea and educated workers is less of an issue obviously assuming that they are being paid fairly.
 
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M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
You got a link for the length of a h1b visa?

My understanding is that it's for 3 years and can get extended to 6 years.

There is alot of shitty things that MS does including contracting and laying people off during massive profits. Using oversea and educated workers is less of an issue obviously assuming that they are being paid fairly.
There is like a ton of articles, the problem is how this workforce is treated. Generally you get fired in games like these by MS. There was even a Schreier article on this in context to Halo deveopment, I remember the tweet, but it is like a year ago?

Layoffs 2022: Indians with H1B visas struggle to find jobs, US says exploring options to help immigrants - India Today
Something more recent
 

LordCBH

Member
I think a majority of people could’ve told Microsoft years ago that HoloLens wasn’t a winner. It’s cool. But cool doesn’t mean profitable. The writing was on the wall on this the moment they announced it.
 

reksveks

Member
There is like a ton of articles, the problem is how this workforce is treated. Generally you get fired in games like these by MS. There was even a Schreier article on this in context to Halo deveopment, I remember the tweet, but it is like a year ago?

Layoffs 2022: Indians with H1B visas struggle to find jobs, US says exploring options to help immigrants - India Today
Something more recent
The workforce especially on h1b visa can be treated better especially when the companies are doing layoffs but thats a slightly different area to how companies are using it.

Meta got slightly better at this with their recent round of layoffs, and it seems like h1b dependent companies are extending the termination period to enable people affected to have longer to find another sponsor or providing more support. You don't want the reputation of pull employees visa.

We’ll be offering 6 months of healthcare, job placement services, and immigration support for those affected.
From Alphabet today.

But generally the visa are for 3years-6years assuming you have a sponsor.

The bigger issue for Microsoft is their contracting policy.
 
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It’s awful and is one of the things that need to change about some of these companies, they have almost no social responsibility to their workers. A company as big and profitable as MS who spends billions on failed endeavors like Mixer and is now spending 70 billions on AB has no business laying off ten thousand workers just so the higher ups get to keep their bonuses while making shareholders happy.

Companies who are swimming in money and posting ridiculous profits should be forced by law to keep their workforce intact and find different ways to grow.
And what are you suggesting? That a company becomes some sort of charity? I just wish the higher ups had their work evaluated with the same criteria as a random low-level employee. It does seem that after a certain level they start protecting themselves and aren’t treated with the same critical view as a random employee. There is always an excuse for the company poor performance and it’s never the lack of competence from the guys up there.
 
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Ozriel

M$FT
You are literally an astrotufer working overtime in every thread.

You keep using that word without knowing what it means. Countering fanboy nonsense doesn’t translate to ‘astroturfing’

Whatever hololens is or was is irrelevant. MS pulled this shit out at E3 because Sony brought out VR. Gamers can talk about it if they want.

Did they bring it out at E3 because Sony brought out VR? That’s possible, but doesn’t seem plausible. There were never any claims of Xbox console integration, so it was never meant to rival PlayStation. I suspect they put that there because they had limited content to show from an anaemic first party setup, and MS were billing Hololens as a consumer device at that point.

Nevertheless, you probably should have wailed about it when they killed consumer Hololens back in 2019. That’s nearly 3 years ago, to this day. And enterprise only hardware getting scaled back does not belong in gaming side discussions.
 

wolffy71

Banned
I think a majority of people could’ve told Microsoft years ago that HoloLens wasn’t a winner. It’s cool. But cool doesn’t mean profitable. The writing was on the wall on this the moment they announced it.
There's a large portion of the world that finds AR more usable than VR, the armed forces for example. The issue is vr and ar just makes too many people motion sick for it to mass adopted. Maybe the fix comes with better tech at some point but for now, they are both just gimics.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Reminds me of a story. My friend got bought by ms and after working there several years told me:

"The problem is that the guy who made hololens and the guy who made metro have to sit there and talk pretending one is not a genius and one is not an idiot."

What is Metro?
 

gundalf

Member
That sucks, I know some good people there and I also helped a bit in making official dev demos and documentation for the mixed reality toolkit :(

But the writing was kind of on the wall, the HoloLens time was so magical and then came the HoloLens 2 and the shitstorm started with units being initially only available to partners, bad communication, worse display, too pricy, still sticking with Windows, forcing UWP and so reducing the ability what apps can do, shifting core functionality to Azure Services (Spatial Anchors, Speech recognition, etc.), breaking changes in MRTK with no benefits. Oh man I could go on but I hope the department will still live one in a way or another.
 

Corndog

Banned
Taking a loss, fucking maybe don't try to buy Activions for double the price and let people keep the work. Shit like this makes me angry, they are swimming in money and "gotta go plebs"

Also this not even counting their H1B "strategy", but keep boats about your friendly face MS.
This isn’t the cry about Activision merger thread.
 

Corndog

Banned
It’s awful and is one of the things that need to change about some of these companies, they have almost no social responsibility to their workers. A company as big and profitable as MS who spends billions on failed endeavors like Mixer and is now spending 70 billions on AB has no business laying off ten thousand workers just so the higher ups get to keep their bonuses while making shareholders happy.

Companies who are swimming in money and posting ridiculous profits should be forced by law to keep their workforce intact and find different ways to grow.
What bullcrap. So you want the government to tell companies when they can fire workers? How entitled are you?

These companies look at the future and see problems so they are cutting the deadwood now before they start hemorrhaging money.
 
Taking a loss, fucking maybe don't try to buy Activions for double the price and let people keep the work. Shit like this makes me angry, they are swimming in money and "gotta go plebs"

Also this not even counting their H1B "strategy", but keep boats about your friendly face MS.
That is a little different. Buying Activision is an investment for the future.... maybe just not the future you wanted. Cutting cost and investment for the future work a little differently.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Nope. Are you ignorant of the posting rules or something? Or do you need someone to hold your hand?
Posting rules of what, it is related anyway, so it's not like I am talking about absolutely unrelated shit.

And again, are you mod, that you care what is written here or something, do you mind to go past on one post or anything.

You know how many topics here would have to be prohibited here, if you could go on little tangent?
 

Thirty7ven

Banned
What bullcrap. So you want the government to tell companies when they can fire workers? How entitled are you?

These companies look at the future and see problems so they are cutting the deadwood now before they start hemorrhaging money.

Entitled? The government tells you where you can and can’t piss, don’t be such a damn fool.
 

MarkMe2525

Member
It's 100% gaming news.
How so? MS demonstrated the previous, consumer facing, configuration of Hololens playing Minecraft nearly 6 years ago. Hololens isn't even a consumer product anymore.

Here is the current listing on MS own website.
lEgBjwJ.jpg
2laseyQ.jpg
vMEvGBS.jpg


Even the base configuration is marketed with its enterprise application integration.

Admittedly, as a tech enthusiast, I have a general interest in the development of such platforms and hardware, but it's an illogical stretch to categories news about the halolens platform as "gaming news".

Edit: I forgot that the conference was in 2015, so that would make the demonstration over 7 years old and not nearly 6 as I stated earlier.
 
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How so? MS demonstrated the previous, consumer facing, configuration of Hololens playing Minecraft nearly 6 years ago. Hololens isn't even a consumer product anymore.

Here is the current listing on MS own website.
lEgBjwJ.jpg
2laseyQ.jpg
vMEvGBS.jpg


Even the base configuration is marketed with its enterprise application integration.

Admittedly, as a tech enthusiast, I have a general interest in the development of such platforms and hardware, but it's an illogical stretch to categories news about the halolens platform as "gaming news".
It’s just an excuse for dorks here to shit on MS.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
That is just the price you sell stuff to the government. I have seen a deicer for a helicopter cost 20k.
Best customer you can get is government. Unlimited pocketbooks, eternal red deficits nobody cares about, and zero negotiation skills.

Even for all the crap the companies I've worked at (stuff that sells in stores from $1 to 100), the provincial contracts we'd get in the past had zero (I REPEAT ZERO) discounts. They accepted our cost price without blinking.

Even Billy Bob's Bargain Barn would do their best shaving off 5 or 10% off our official standard price list. And the account manager would take that request, come to the finance department and it'd get green lighted fast. All you got to do is ask. Small requests are easy to approve. The bigger guys like Walmart are a different story. More like 20%+ off. But it's worth the time and effort. When millions of dollars are on the line, each side digs into it.

Government. 0%. I guess millions of dollars saved isnt worth the time.
 
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Corndog

Banned
Posting rules of what, it is related anyway, so it's not like I am talking about absolutely unrelated shit.

And again, are you mod, that you care what is written here or something, do you mind to go past on one post or anything.

You know how many topics here would have to be prohibited here, if you could go on little tangent?
You can post what you want. And I can tell you it’s an off topic rant.
 

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
You knew HoloLens would be a failure after the Zune, and kinect it’s just like make console hardware and move on.
 
So blame us because MS couldn't get their product into the gaming space? Yet we are the dorks? Man, please. Take the pipe of your mouth and understand what happened here.
I'm unaware of any point in which I blamed you. Relax, you'll live longer. Life is too short to be irate about words on a message board.
 
Shill harder Bloomberg.

Also doesn't mention the hundreds of millions (just under a billion) approved in the past two fiscal quarters for IVAS which was used to order the first 5,000 headsets, with another 5,000 headsets coming... and how much will MSFT get paid for IVAS 1.2 development again? Another $125M to turn it from the goggle mounted version to a helmet mounted version with updated digital NV sensors?
 

The Alien

Banned
Thank Christ that Bing is still safe.
How do I know?:

Cuz there's not 7 fucking GAF threads here celebrating. That's what we've devolved into. Getting lame. Step away, keyboard warriors...step away. Get some sun.
 
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