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Microsoft

Leaked Email Shows Microsoft Expects Its HoloLens-like Goggles To Disappoint Soldiers (businessinsider.com) 30

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft won a contract worth up to $22 billion to build HoloLens-like goggles for the US military. The contract has had delays and quality problems amid strategic confusion in its mixed reality unit. Microsoft is expecting a negative reception due to ongoing problems with the device's reliability and its performance in low light environments, adding uncertainty ahead of the planned operational tests in May, according to the email. "We (Microsoft) are going into the event expecting negative feedback from the customer," a Microsoft employee wrote on Thursday in a memo to members of the company's military contract team, including AI and mixed reality general manager David Marra. "We expect soldier sentiment to continue to be negative as reliability improvements have been minimal from previous events."
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Leaked Email Shows Microsoft Expects Its HoloLens-like Goggles To Disappoint Soldiers More

Leaked Email Shows Microsoft Expects Its HoloLens-like Goggles To Disappoint Soldiers

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  • Something slipped deadlines, is disappointing, and they expect it to continue to be disappointing to the user because "reliability improvements have been minimal." Yup. Sounds like a Microsoft product.

    • "Sounds like a Microsoft product." - Maybe if they remove the ads and telemetry from the headset quality and reliability will improve?
    • Indeed. Some of the most recent night vision prototypes are effectively a form of augmented reality. There is targeting stuff, information, etc which is similar.

      So, as you have guessed - Microsoft failed to deliver where others succeeded. So it is trying to make a happy face with a bad card hand. Pity it sucks at poker.

      • Instead of wasting this money on military tech garbage that will never be used, if the government had allocated this money to the NIH, it would have boosted the NIH budget by over 50%. That would have actually given US taxpayers something for their money. But instead, they give the money to a bloated corporation that never delivers what it promises.

        • Hold up, operating effectively in the dark is one of our biggest and most cost-effective advantages.

    • They just borrowed that memo from the Microsoft Office team.

  • It was the ads they didn't like.

    • Or maybe it's Clippy?

      "Heya, it would seem that you want to disable an enemy main battle tank? Do you want to continue? Y/N"

      • "It looks like you're writing a sharply worded letter to a dictator, do you want help with this?"

  • That we still pay full price for it. And we also pay them for any attempts at correcting the problems.
    Kinda like a NASA contract.

  • Did anyone really expect a modern tech company to provide quality and stability? They're used to a more forgiving general public and have no experience in building truly durable products.

    • This is when Big Tech steps up and wins the day by pushing the pre-installed backdoor buttons. All mobile phones in Russia beeping and showing an emergency for a lost elderly person in the Kremlin while the GPS directs all soldiers to a lake in Kamchatka. Meanwhile in the Duma, still socially isolated, Putin is saying "can anyone hear me yet?" on the Teams call. Generals on the front line report that their battle systems are shutting down with the message "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart;

  • What the fuck are those VR goggles made of? Platinum?

  • ...AND we'll make them pay for it!

    Trump University gives you an A+

  • It is very difficult to operate at night, especially when it comes to computer equipment. How are you to see your "screen" in the dark without giving your position away? You can't exactly just turn up the brightness as you might as well paint a target on your back and give your location away to those that are hunting you. You want more cpu? You can't exactly ramp up the fan curve to let the CPU operate at its max settings. Everything that you do in a clean, controlled lab environment is completely out the d

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      How are you to see your "screen" in the dark without giving your position away?

      Night vision equipment has had this problem solved for decades. Eye cups. That said, we are a long way from usable digital night/thermal vision. The latency is too high to target a moving object well. Analog still wins with the people that have to use this stuff to stay alive.

  • The guy charged with using the government-purchased weapon is always less enthusiastic about it than the government purchaser was.
  • It's the Blue Scream of Death that's the problem.

  • I, for one, am getting really sick of hearing about these open-ended vaporware BS contracts that our governments are tying down our militaries with. The Pentagon didn't even want the JSF, at a cost equal to the annual cost of ALL of our public K-12 schools *combined* and that was *before* the overruns. They wanted uprated A-10s and F-14s. Proven tech. And maybe goggles that can provide information in the field like these are a great idea. Maybe they aren't. But these companies need to offer *a working damne

    • I don't think you realize how much good shit has come out of DARPA funneling money to develop shit that didn't exist.... DARPA funding is responsible for... The computer mouse (1964), GPS(1983), voice assistants (2002), Drones (1988), The internet(1969) - and many more. Sure there have been failures, but the successes have literally changed the world.

      • I know a lot about exactly how much good *and bad* has come out of our black ops programs. This sort of mentality has bit us in the ass more than it has ever benefitted us, with the CIA continually creating tomorrow's bad guy today, and DARPA giving us the wonder that is Facebook. In the meantime, everything you mentioned except possibly the mouse was imagined in sci-fi (the mouse was basically the British Navy and Stanford) and would have been invented by someone without lying to the American public about

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Klaxton ( 609696 )

      It isn't a open-ended contract, did you read the article? "Congress recently cut procurement funding for the contract" and the military might walk away from it.

      "Microsoft needed at least $604 million to meet the minimum order quantity and recover its costs, according to a person familiar with the contract. "

      And if they can't deliver according to the specs they won't get it.

      • "Read the article". This IS still Slashdot, right? ;)

        It's good to know that this particular thing isn't part of the overall pattern I was talking about. Which definitely is a thing, and I'm going to go yell at a cloud about it now.

  • Tite: "The Goggles - They Do Nothing!"

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