HoloLens News is Just the Latest Evidence of Microsoft’s Real Focus (Premium)

While Microsoft enthusiasts continue to react poorly to the software giant’s new strategy, I see a clarity here that should be celebrated. Microsoft is doing the right thing.

Yesterday, Brad reported on a story he’s been working on for a while now: Multiple sources have now confirmed that Microsoft has halted development of a second-generation HoloLens headset.

To this news, specifically, I say only the following: Whoo-de-doo. Yes, that’s the professional term.

Folks, HoloLens is, was always, and will always be, a niche device. It is nothing more and nothing less than a proof point, a way of Microsoft showing to the world that, yes, you can realistically root holographic objects into a real-world viewport and, in doing so, create compelling merged reality experiences that can be productive or entertaining. (Or both.)

There are other things about HoloLens that Microsoft likes to promote—it is, Microsoft never tires of telling anyone who will listen, “the world’s first untethered holographic computer”—but those are distractions. The central point of HoloLens is its underlying technology. Which is excellent.

But Microsoft is Microsoft. And its real go-to-market strategy with HoloLens was revealed last year. And that strategy does not involve selling $3000 vertically-integrated, niche market headsets to individuals or mainstream businesses. It involves something very familiar instead: Microsoft is partnering with hardware makers to bring this technology to the masses at a variety of price points and capability levels. Just as it first did with PCs. And has done many, many times since.

But as with Windows phone—now Microsoft’s worst product failure by far—Microsoft enthusiasts dream of a miracle weapon that will set things right. With HoloLens, they imagine some v2 version of the product that has both a wider field of view and a much lower cost, something that will blow would-be competitors like Apple and Google out of the water. And, more important, reestablish Microsoft as the platform maker to be reckoned with.

Folks. Come on. The United Kingdom is still pretty great, but the days of Pax Britannica are over. Microsoft is in the same position: Time has simply moved on, and the days of a single monopoly in personal computing are likewise over.

But that doesn’t mean Microsoft doesn’t have a future, a grand future. And that’s what the phrase “mobile first, cloud first” is really all about. A compact way to describe what is a massive consolidated effort to pivot Microsoft around its new future, its new strategy.

Now, I am among those who have pointed out that “mobile first, cloud first” should more rightly be named “cloud first, mobile second.” Back in 2014, I wrote that “mobile [seems like] the weak link” for Microsoft here, if you take this phrase literally. But Satya Nadella and company never meant this literally. They were referring to mobile more broadly. “Nadella is including—even emphasizing—mobile devices and platforms that are popular but made by other companies.”

I think the events of the past two and a half years have proven this contention nicely. Yes, Microsoft makes devices like Surface that are somewhat successful, and hugely inspirational, but its in-house mobile efforts—the Windows phone OS and hardware—were, again, a historic failure.

But mobile isn’t really about devices. (Sorry, enthusiasts.) And “mobile first, cloud first” is really about Microsoft ensuring its at both ends of the computing spectrum: The cloud, where various services from multiple sources will interact, delivering end-user value, and mobile, where end users will actually consume that content coming from the cloud.

There are so many examples of how Microsoft has positioned itself for this future that it’s almost pointless to list them all. Office on iPad and iPhone, for example. Its new push into back-end systems for cars and health care, done while dropping front-end solutions of the past. And so on.

But let me provide you with an example that you may not have heard before. Oddly this is, perhaps, the best example of all because it goes right to the heard of Microsoft as a company and how it sees its position in this new world.

I am referring, of course, to .NET.

Microsoft began work on .NET about 20 years ago, back when it was called Next Generation Windows Services. As that original name suggests, .NET was envisioned to be the foundation for Windows software development for the next 10 or 20 years, just like the Win16/Win32 environments of the time supplied the basis for all of the Windows software before that.

As a product of the year 2000 (or so), .NET was forward-leaning enough to be based on standards-based technology of the day like XML, and it improved on non-open technologies like Java by being language independent—Microsoft created C# for .NET but it also works fine with Visual Basic and even C++, and any programming language can be made compatible—and by opening up pieces of this technology as standards.

To be fair, the original vision for .NET was also limited by Microsoft’s worldview at that time. It was Windows-centric, despite the standards pushes, and Microsoft did not port this technology to rival platforms like OS X, UNIX or Linus. (It also did not prevent others from doing so, and companies like Ximiam did indeed undergo such efforts.) And it was focused on both the client side (Windows client) and the server (Windows Server + IIS). Because that is where Microsoft was focused. At that time.

Today, Microsoft’s “Windows first” and “Windows best” strategies have been cast aside so it can embrace this new “mobile first, cloud first” strategy. And .NET, as seen in that original generation, is no longer viable either.

So Microsoft has started over.

Microsoft is replacing .NET with .NET Core, an open-source, cross-platform version of .NET. It runs, out of the box, on Windows, macOS, and various flavors of Linux. And while you could create client-side solutions with this technology—using the Universal Windows Platform, which derives from this work—.NET Core is really focused on the cloud.

Microsoft also purchased Xamarin last year, and that is its new client strategy for developers, a clean, cross-platform approach that lets you create native apps that run equally across Android, iOS and even Windows Mobile. That this toolset is integrated into the best development environment available, Visual Studio, is perhaps the icing on the cake.

With Xamarin and .NET Core, we see the truth behind “mobile first, cloud first” because this is the purest expression of this strategy, the real world result of its plans. This is what developers are presented with when they approach the Microsoft stack in 2017. Open source. Cross-platform. Not just Windows. They see “mobile first, cloud first.”

So back to HoloLens.

The news this week is what happens when you laser-focus and take no prisoners: You aggressively drop products and services that no longer make sense under your strategy. Or products and services that lose money. And HoloLens fits both of those criteria, doesn’t? As “cool” as you make think it is, HoloLens is not a business. It’s just an inspiration for developers to think about the future, and to consider Microsoft’s innovation when they think about that future. And the last thing Microsoft needs right now is yet another overly-expensive niche product dragging down its More Personal Computing division.

I’m on board with this future. You should be too.