Microsoft isn’t giving up on its HoloLens mixed-reality headset—at least not yet. Officials recently blogged about the company’s thinking about HoloLens and mixed reality at the tail end of a year which hasn’t been a banner one for HoloLens.
Microsoft will continue to work on the core HoloLens hardware technologies, including displays, tracking, sensors and battery life. But it doesn’t sound like a follow-on to the HoloLens 2, which debuted in 2019, is imminent. Microsoft Mixed Reality Vice President Scott Evans said outright that Microsoft believes its customers “don’t need a successor yet, but they want to know it will be there at the right time.”
Microsoft is, however, likely to introduce a number of software and services improvements that will impact the HoloLens directly in the coming months and year. Microsoft continues to tout HoloLens as a key piece of its “industrial metaverse” strategy and set of products. A week ago, officials said that they are combining two Microsoft-developed mixed-reality apps: Dynamics 365 Guides and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, into a single app. They also are making it possible for HoloLens users to access their Teams calendars; join meetings; participate in Teams text chats; and access images or PDFs shared as holograms.
(Microsoft is pushing integrations with work-focused Microsoft 365 apps, including Team as a priority for not only its own mixed-reality offerings, but those from partners like Meta, as well.)
I’ve heard there are more incremental integrations coming to HoloLens and mixed reality for industrial purposes in calendar 2023. Microsoft is looking to bring more Teams, Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations integrations to the platform, my contacts say. A new mobile app UI and Guides 2D capabilities on mobile are in the cards. And a “Frontline Service Assistant” of some sort is on the 2023 roadmap, too, I am hearing.
Company officials say Microsoft “want(s) HoloLens to be our screens for our frontline workers.” And frontline workers (also known as deskless workers), who include customer service reps, medical workers, and manufacturing workers, among other categories, are a key target audience for Microsoft in terms of growing its Microsoft 365 footprint.
I’m thinking we could hear at least a bit more about the HoloLens’ future as soon as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January. Microsoft is a featured CES exhibitor this coming year and plans to discuss how the future of car buying and the metaverse intersect. They also plan to talk about mixed reality transforming customer service and customer experiences and connected, autonomous and “software-defined” mobility. Microsoft “Connected Fleets,” which officials describe as a new reference architecture for connecting partners via common architecture, data models and business apps all anchored in the Microsoft cloud, also will be a theme at CES, officials say. Connected Fleets and Fleet Management use the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform to obtain data from and manage
Microsoft has not released shipment or sales numbers for HoloLens to date. While the second iteration of the HoloLens goggles offered noticeable improvements over the first, they still feel like a fairly pricey solution in search of a problem, in many ways. Just because Microsoft envisions HoloLens devices as becoming the lens through which frontline and other workers collaborate in the workplace doesn’t mean customers will go this route.
“It’s hard to imagine that VR, AR, MR, whatever you want to call it, won’t be ubiquitous and natural in about 30 years, but it’s not ready for mainstream today,” said Directions on Microsoft analyst Rob Sanfilippo. “That’s been the problem with HoloLens since it was introduced: unfulfilled promises due to mediocre reliability, too little field-of-view, bulky hardware, and demo videos that exaggerate the fidelity of the holograms that are generated. It can be coaxed to work for some scenarios, but further adoption will require more breakthroughs and clarity around how to apply the technology to feasible solutions.”
Ever since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft officials have been working to find ways to integrate OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural-language-model technology into various Microsoft products and services.
Microsoft secured a deal via which Azure became OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. Microsoft created an Azure-based supercomputer to train OpenAI’s massive AI models. In 2020, Microsoft obtained an exclusive license to GPT-3, though OpenAI still offers GPT-3 and other models via its own Azure-hosted programming interface. Microsoft also sells what it calls the Azure OpenAI service, (members) which adds Microsoft-provided enterprise capabilities to the core OpenAI models.
Microsoft already uses OpenAI features internally to power natural language processes in Power BI, Power Apps, and GitHub Copilot (members). Earlier this week, as originally reported by The Information and confirmed by Bloomberg, Microsoft also is working on a way to bring OpenAI’s GPT technology to Bing via ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is a chat bot that is in public preview from OpenAI that isn’t connected to web-search results. Instead, it is fine-tuned from the GPT-3.5 language model to product text, according to OpenAI. The ChatGPT models were trained on data from the Internet written by humans, including conversations, in order to make it sound more human-like.
Many are assuming that the big advantage Microsoft could gain from ChatGPT is in improving the way web-search results are rendered in Bing. But the real potential value of ChatGPT to Bing isn’t mostly about natural-language answers to web-search queries, given that Bing, like Google, already has been providing for years more than a bunch of blue links in response to web-search queries.
Sure, ChatGPT could evolve Bing web search into something more conversational, rather than having users craft query terms to get the results they need. But do people really need that? It feels as if users have become accustomed to and proficient at crafting queries, and conversational search could be cumbersome. Knowledge workers and power users don’t need the overhead of conversing with “intelligent” agents.
What if ChatGPT enables Microsoft to pull over the goal-line its long-rumored and occasionally seen Bing chatbot? ChatGPT also could play a role in providing more contextual answers not just to Bing web-search queries but also to unified Microsoft Search queries across more of Microsoft’s enterprise products and services.
Microsoft has been working on a service called “Bing Concierge Bot” since at least 2016. For a while (during the rise and eventual fall of Microsoft’s Cortana assistant), the Bing Concierge Bot project went quiet. But it reemerged in 2021 and has been tested publicly in various geographies since then in the form of a Bing chat bot. Some Bing users reported seeing the experimental Bing chat bot pop up when doing web searches at various points in 2021 and 2022.
Some may forget that Bing is more than just a web-search engine. Bing also is part of the Microsoft Search built-in search service for a number of Microsoft 365 enterprise products (members). If Microsoft ends up integrating ChatGPT into Microsoft Search, it potentially could bring deeper, more natural-language style responses to queries for business-specific queries within products like Teams, SharePoint and more, I’d think.
While it’s easy to paint the OpenAI-Microsoft alliance as being a way for Microsoft to try to grow Bing’s web-search share vs. Google, there are a number of other equally far-ranging implications for what ChatGPT and GPT in general could bring to Microsoft and customers.
When Microsoft introduced its $10 per user/per month Teams Premium add-on in October 2022, the company didn’t make clear that some features that users get now as part of the core Teams edition will be moving to Premium. But that, indeed, will be the case right after the Premium add-on is commercially available in February 2023.
Microsoft revealed the planned line-up switch earlier this week, as discovered by The Register. Updated information in Microsoft’s licensing documentation for partners clarified that a handful of existing Teams features will be moving to Teams Premium. As we noted in a recent Directions on Microsoft Briefing podcast episode, live translated captions was known to be a Premium feature, but Microsoft originally did not make it clear that it planned to move existing, no-additional-cost Teams features into the Premium add-on and make them available only for an extra fee.
The Microsoft-provided list of existing Teams features moving to the Premium add-on:
- Live translated captions;
- Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings;
- Custom organization Together mode scenes;
- Virtual Appointments: SMS notifications;
- Virtual Appointments: Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center;
- Virtual Appointments: Scheduled queue view.
Officials said these features will continue to be available for no additional cost to Teams business customers for 30 days following the date when Teams Premium is generally available.
Microsoft officials were a bit squirrely about the feature line-up for Teams vs. Teams Premium when I asked last year whether the newly announced Teams Premium features would be available only as part of the Premium add-on or not.
At that time, officials did say that the Premium add-on option would be available to customers with the following plans: Microsoft/Office 365 E1, E3, E5; Microsoft Teams Essentials (Azure AD), Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium; Microsoft 365 F1 and F3 and Office 365 F3; Microsoft/Office 365 A1, A3, A5; and Government. Microsoft/Office 365 G3 and G5. They did acknowledge that the majority of the capabilities introduced in Teams Premium will have a licensing policy based on the meeting organizer, so that attendees without Teams Premium who are in a meeting organized by a Teams Premium licensed user be able to use the premium features, with the exception of Intelligent recap.
In addition to the aforementioned Teams Premium features, the Premium add-on will include Meeting Guides; Advanced Meeting Protection; and Advanced webinars
Update (January 13): It looks like the regular vs. Premium feature set isn’t the only Teams-related switcheroo happening. Microsoft also is notifying users of the “classic” free version of Teams that businesses will no longer have access to it after April 12, 2023. Microsoft’s notification page on the change suggests users go with Teams Essentials, the standalone, $4 per user per month, version instead. However, there still will continue to be a free Teams client available.
Users who make the switch from the classic to newer free version will be able to view and save files in their current account through April 12, but none of their information will transfer to their new free account, the page states. The newer Teams free client includes unlimited group meetings up to 60 minutes long; up to 100 participants per meeting; and 5 GB of cloud storage per user. I’ve asked Microsoft for information on what’s different between the newer and older free clients, as well as why it is dropping the classic free Teams client. No word back so far. (Thanks to “WalkingCat” on Twitter for the heads up on this.)
(Update: January 16) Microsoft seems to be doing this in order to have a single free client for both personal and small business. Teams Free (classic) was built on Azure Active Directory, and the new Teams (free) is built on Microsoft Account (MSA). For the past year-plus,Microsoft has only allowed new customers to sign up for the new Teams (free).
Microsoft recently took the wraps off the “Microsoft Supply Chain Platform” in November, calling the bundle of AI, collaboration, low-code, security, and SaaS applications a “composable platform” for organizations focused on their supply chain investments.
What, exactly, is this thing? Is it yet another Microsoft industry cloud without the typical naming convention (which, in this case, would have been “Supply Chain Cloud”)? Is it a rebrand of the set of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (members) offerings? It has connections to the Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, and Order Management. And the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is part of the core, which Microsoft says will orchestrate data from not just Dynamics 365, but also SAP and Oracle SAP ERP systems.
Lately, Microsoft has been rebranding a lot of products and services without explicitly calling their relaunch a “rebrand.” (See “Microsoft Syntex,” the product formerly known as “SharePoint Syntex” and Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL as just a couple of recent examples.) But the new Supply Chain Center isn’t so much of a rebrand as a new bundle.
The Supply Chain Platform and Supply Chain Center ” specifically address organizations’ supply chain execution, management and orchestration needs. Microsoft’s supply chain capabilities can be integrated into any Industry Cloud, and their Industry data models to quickly adopt and support their supply chain agility needs,” said a company spokesperson when I asked for additional clarity.
“The Industry Clouds are a holistic solution for an industry-specific customer, whether it’s financial services, or retail, or manufacturing. But any of the companies in these industries still have the supply chain function, they have a marketing function, sales function, service function. Microsoft works very closely with the industry team to provide the foundational solution, so they can create the vertical extensions,” the spokesperson added.
Microsoft is not dropping support for the existing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management module. Instead, in a similar way that it is doing with its Viva Sales (and other coming “role-based” Viva offerings), Microsoft s including hooks into non-Dynamics products with the Supply Chain Platform, the spokesperson confirmed. One more interesting positioning tidbit: Microsoft considers the new Supply Chain Platform to be both an app and a platform, similar to the Microsoft Digital Contact Center, which is anchored by Nuance’s contact-center technology.
It’s worth noting Microsoft isn’t the only cloud vendor eying the potential of managing customers’ supply chains. AWS announced in late November that it also has a supply-chain-management app, AWS Supply Chain, that is now in preview. AWS’ product offers unified data lake, machine-learning-based insights, recommended actions, and in-application collaboration capabilities. It will be interesting to see if customers are willing to share this kind of data with a vendor that is all about its own supply chains.
When Microsoft launched its Azure Percept IoT dev kit in March 2021, it had some lofty goals for it. Officials went so far as to say that they saw Percept as the cornerstone for building an IoT device ecosystem around Azure services the same way that Windows helped create the PC market.But these plans have fizzled to the point of Microsoft dropping Azure Percept in 2023 (members).
Azure Percept—which never exited preview—was/is heavily focused on AI. It includes a development kit with a camera called “Azure Percept Vision.” It also has an Azure Percept Studio “getting started” experience meant to guide customers who don’t have a lot of coding experience through the AI lifecycle of developing, training, and deploying proof-of-concept ideas.
Azure Percept Audio, which like Azure Percept Vision, ships separately from the dev kit, is meant to enable AI speech services on edge devices. Azure Percept devices can automatically connect to Azure IoT Hub to enable secure communications between IoT devices and the cloud. Microsoft announced the end of Azure Percept rather quietly in a note it posted in mid-October to its Microsoft Learn documentation page about the product.
The note says:
Retirement of Azure Percept DK:
The Azure Percept public preview will be evolving to support new edge device platforms and developer experiences. As part of this evolution the Azure Percept DK and Audio Accessory and associated supporting Azure services for the Percept DK will be retired March 30th, 2023. Effective March 30th, 2023, the Azure Percept DK and Audio Accessory will no longer be supported by any Azure services including Azure Percept Studio, OS updates, containers updates, view web stream, and Custom Vision integration. Microsoft will no longer provide customer success support and any associated supporting services. For more information, please visit the Retirement Notice Blog Post.
Users will need to close the resources and projects associated with the Azure Percept Studio and DK to avoid future billing, Microsoft said in a related Percept retirement blog post. In early November, Microsoft added an update to its retirement information, stating:
A firmware update that enables the Vision SoM and Audio SOM to retain their functionality with the DK beyond the retirement date, will be made available before the retirement date.
I’d assume lack of traction is at least one of the reasons for the fast phase-out of Azure Percept. Another could be a reprioritization and reorg which moved some of the previously independent IoT teams at Microsoft under Azure. I asked officials if they’d say more about the reasons for the discontinuation of Azure Percept beyond the brief retirement statement. A spokesperson declined to provide more information beyond this additional statement:
“As the needs of our customers evolve, we regularly update our product lineup to best support them. From time to time, this includes introducing technical innovations and retiring products. Microsoft provides ample resources to assist customers, ensuring any transition is as seamless as possible.”
Microsoft is working on a new set of apps that its officials hope will help the company sell customers outside of IT on the benefits of Microsoft’s Power Platform low-code toolset. The deliverables, known internally as “Power House,” will include both first-party, Microsoft-developed apps and third-party-developed ones, all built on top of the Power Platform.
The “House” component of the Power House name aligns with the “Rooms of the House” concept that Microsoft uses internally in sales, marketing, and engineering to develop and sell products based on personas, according to contacts of mine who asked not to be named. Microsoft’s initial targets with Power House apps include sales, customer service, finance, and supply-chain business-decision makers.
Microsoft’s current plan is to start with two or three Microsoft-developed Power House solutions, which it will introduce in preview during the first part of 2023, my sources say. Microsoft plans to include these Power House apps in premium Power Platform plans, rather than introduce them as separate SKUs, I hear. By some point in its fiscal year 2024 (which runs from July 2023 to June 2024), Microsoft is hoping to have more than 10 announced Power House apps and to get third-party developers to introduce their own Power House apps via Microsoft’s AppSource online marketplace, people say.
Microsoft is counting on some Power Platform-based apps the company already has developed for internal use to help fill out its Power House line-up. Microsoft’s internal finance department, for example, has built a number of apps for its own use as part of its work to modernize its own processes, which potentially could become part of the Power House family. Potential Power House apps could include solutions across auditing, cash-distribution approval and contract management, my contacts say.
Power House apps will be more than just templates, but still customizable by customers and Microsoft reseller and integrator partners. external auditing app for processing and sharing documents; a cash-distributions approvals app; supply relationship management app; and contract management app—any of which could become part of the Power House family.
I’ve asked Microsoft for more information on Power House, including when it will start making the first apps available in public preview. No word back so far.
Over the past year, Microsoft has been getting more involved in building and selling apps and services to companies in targeted industries. Microsoft already had been going vertical with (members) its growing family of Industry Clouds, which are bundles of apps, services and templates for companies in areas like healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing and more. At the same time, with Viva Sales, its CRM companion app—and its expected other Viva horizontal apps in finance, IT and marketing. I wonder if Microsoft will shift gears here and use Power House branding and strategy instead of introducing more Viva-branded horizontal apps such as “Viva Sales,” as it moves forward.