Re: Windows10 just plain sucks. HoloLens are a useless crap.
You have completely missed the point of the glasses. They're a tool, not a toy. Nobody will wear them outdoors ... unless they're doing work that requires them.
I was sceptical about this when I saw the presentation, but today I can think of hundreds of applications for this in industry.
What this can do is provide a standard interface and API for 3D visualisation, one that allows anyone (Autodesk, for example, or SolidWorks) to add holographic modelling and manipulation to their product. And there's a mass-produced client device to lower the cost of using the technology to the point where small practices can afford it. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, you're not in an industry where showing people things, in 3D, that don't actually exist yet, is important. Here are some examples:
You're an architect, and you're trying to show a client what you mean about moving a ceiling, or you're a surveyor, and you're trying to perform an initial layout of a building site on the ground. Or you're a car designer, and you're trying to get a feel of your work in three dimensions. Using this is a hell of a lot cheaper than clay modelling, and your engineering department can see the changes you make, and can work remotely with you as if you're all standing around the same life-scale model. When you're done, your brand manager can have a look, and even if she's in Michigan, Turin or Paris she can see how the design is progressing, "walk" around it, and make informed comment.
Outside of creative tasks, how about maintenance of industrial equipment: the glasses can provide you with annotations in real space showing you the assemblies that you need to repair, or an X-Ray view of the equipment you're servicing.
Speaking of X-Rays, this kind of technology is already very useful in medical training: there are exisiting surgical training systems using VR; this product lowers the cost of delivery of these, allowing their use in teaching to be broadened.
All of these applications are possible now, but the barrier has been that there's no common API or client device specification, so my 3D visualisation system might not work with your CAD package, for instance. More important, nobody mass-produces the equipment, so it's horrendously expensive. Microsoft's product and adding the APIs to Windows makes both of these adoption barriers smaller.
(The iPhone did not create the idea of mobile applications, what it did was lower the barriers to developing and selling mobile applications)
Google's failure was that there was no actual need for Glass - it basically gave you a smartphone that you didn't have to take out of your pocket. Glass was a consumption device, not creation. Glass was expected to be worn all the time, rather than when there was a need for it. Very different usage models, very different capabilites, and very different applications.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
