Microsoft mops up Mesh after another metaverse misfire

As of December 1, mixed reality collaboration platform Microsoft Mesh is no more, and Redmond has directed customers to immersive events in Teams. The writing has been on the wall for Microsoft Mesh for some time. After a lengthy stint in preview, the service became generally available in 2024 as a 3D world where users could …

[Anonymous Coward]

Teams is completely unfit for any purpose. Other than turning the surface of my Macbook into a subtrate for frying eggs.

[ComicalEngineer]

I completely agree that Teams is clunky and pretty horrible to use, but it works passably well on my laptop.

The only thing I don't understand is why anyone (other than a 12 year old) would actually want a 3D avatar in a meeting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a camera, so I use an avatar!

I do think that many of the gestures are not suitable for meetings - apart from the yawn and watch tapping ones!

Which, last time I look had been removed!

[FirstTangoInParis]

All we want ….

… is a tool to talk one to many and possibly to decency other. That’s it. The service can barely support that as it is, and even my works PC struggles with that (despite 16 Gigathings of memory and some ludicrously over specified processor; one used to be able to run video calling over ISDN with a 50 MHz Sparc processor, so why all these gigahertz, hmm?). The rest of it? Go play some First Person Shooter game instead. I think there are sometimes meetings I’d like to take weapons to, just to help the meeting reach a conclusion in good time.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: All we want ….

Work desktop is rather old but still pretty powerful, with a 4th gen i7 and 32GB RAM, plus a Nvidia GTX 750Ti graphics card from its days as a developer workstation.

"Classic" teams ran fine. The "New" Teams? At idle it occupies a whole GB of VRAM, and any calls run the graphics card at about 50-75% load depending on the number of participants.

My old work laptop was a 6th gen i7, and "New" Teams used to complain about the computer "not having enough resources" when on a call with more than five people. Indeed it refused to display all the webcam feeds and limited it to whoever was talking plus the screenshare!

I can only assume that it's chock full with AI bullshit and spyware as this is hardly new technology. Of course Microsoft fucked it up as usual.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: All we want ….meetings I’d like to take weapons to

Could be be satisfying to be able in the Teams metaverse to virtually stab your more obnoxious colleagues in the back if only to shut them up.

I could imagine Microsoft's virtual environements infested with malevolent Crap·pilot avatars ever lurking ready to strike.

[Yorick Hunt]

"Immersive!"

Because "wading through shit" takes too long to type.

[Dan 55]

Microsoft Mesh

RIP. Gone but not even remembered, as we never knew it even existed when it was around.

[Random as if !]

SecondLife

Ah. This is where it went!