Microsoft's Own Metaverse Is Coming, and It Will Have PowerPoint (bloomberg.com) 76
If you're worried the metaverse will be all fun and games, fear not: Microsoft is taking its own stab at the idea, and it will have PowerPoint and Excel. From a report: The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the metaverse -- a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds. The first offering, a version of Microsoft's Teams chat and conferencing program that features digital avatars, is in testing now and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features, like PowerPoint decks, in the virtual world. "This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction," Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant and even the international space station, he said. Microsoft also has plans for gaming and entertainment. "You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an interview with Bloomberg. "If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they're 2D today, and the question is can you now take that to a full 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so."
That's gonna be a success! (Score:5, Funny)
Like MSN! And the Zune! And Bing! And ... everything else they tried to copy from some successful company.
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And Powerpoint, Excel, Word, Azure, cloud services....
Microsoft copies very well, in the corporate domain. They're not so good at making consumer stuff, although their tablets suggest they're not as bad as they used to be.
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And let's not forget their Xbox division.
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Well, if you consider the XBox division a copier, I guess the argument could be made.
But then every last game maker has been a copier since the Magnavox Odyssey.
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Re:That's gonna be a success! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can we just call the cancer Metastasis instead? With a hint of luck we make it stick and the whole shit goes the way of the Dodo really fast.
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Nah, Meta has been reserved by Facebook...
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Right. Facebook is the only cancer that may MetaStasize.
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MSN was quite successful, but for some reason microsoft had a fetish to make it worse and worse, at a point there were websites on "how to run older versions of MSN"
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Microsoft: We're the Leader in Following!
Re: That's gonna be a success! (Score:1)
WTF?? (Score:5, Funny)
PP but no Clippy?
Just say it's not so!
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Power point makes you stupid [psychologytoday.com]
So, I guess we can call it the StupidVerse based solely on the existence of PowerPoint.
Clippy would make it more so, expect it to appear in the first upgrade
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Those 3D bar graphs will be literally protruding out of the screen at you.
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What do you think Windows 10 (and now 11) are? They are the offspring of Clippy. Microsoft recently "upgraded" their CRM software. The first thing it notifies you when you open it is Search has been moved front and center to the top of the screen.
WTF? Who the hell cares if it's been moved? Why was it moved in the first place? Here's a question: why is everything in CRM now done via half-screen tabs rather than full screen? Why was that changed?
Literally, in the truest s
More like 3D Bob (Score:2)
...Clippy and Bob will never die, just come back under different names and/or with more dimensions and resolution or hair style changes.
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What about Bob? (Score:2)
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A bug in MS-Bob allowed the dog to burn the house down. I hope MS brings that back also.
Meta (Score:5, Funny)
meta
Welcome to the new overused word of the 2020s.
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meta
Welcome to the new overused word of the 2020s.
No worse than "cyber" everything (1990s). Or "i" everything (aughties and early 2010s).
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This is like metacyber!
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Re: Meta (Score:1)
It's like in comedy. (Score:2)
If you can't do better, go meta.
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When I figure out how to make a blockchain-metaverse I'm finally going to achieve my life long dream of dying accidentally as a tower of VC funded cash collapses on me as I bump into it drunk on a $2000 whiskey while smoking a Cuban cigar in my bathrobe.
I donâ(TM)t see the point of this (Score:2)
Put in a headset and spend your priceless time in a fake fantasy world where you get to ignore reality and stare at advertising all day while real life goes down the toilet. What am I missing?
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What am I missing?
Second Life.
Re: I donâ(TM)t see the point of this (Score:2)
That does not answer the question
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Nothing new (Score:1)
Hmm, "live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds" - Microsoft already did that years ago. Anyone remember Bob - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]?
Come on, Apple (Score:2)
If Apple doesn't announce their version of VR/AR soon, we're going to be stuck with only Microsoft and Facebook for choices. And since both of them have the potential to become the evil "Innovative Online Industries (IOI)" company from Ready Player One so it's not something I'm looking forward to.
Say what you want about Apple, but when a company like Facebook complains that Apple shields their users against Facebook's data-stealing practices, and then turns around and tries to become the gatekeeper of the n
What would it be called I wonder... (Score:1)
Hmm, since Facebook has Metaverse, and Microsoft would probably have the Microverse, I wonder what Apple's would be?
Maybe Tim's Terrarium.
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Anyone with some basic understanding of networking should know that a well functioning Metaverse, like in SciFi movies or novels, is a pipedream.
Even if we managed to built a large network of hollow core fibre, which could reduce latencies of copper/fiber by about 50% it won't yield fast enough transmissions to create a high fidelity experience across larger distances. So what you'll get is pretty much what we already have in MMORPGs these days, a compromise between 'gameplay' and
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And yet today's internet was a pipedream when people were still using 8-bit microcomputers at home.
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I also hear that thing where people say that we also didn't think we could go faster than the speed of sound. It might sound smart to someone who is illiterate in the field, but in reality is an insincere oversimplification at best.
We have had speed of light communication for a very long time like in smoke signals. Sure, the bandwidth sucked, but the transmission speed was already there, which allowed long range communication within fractions of a second.
Likewise we've had MMO
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The Apple Orchard.
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Nah. iVerse all the way.
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Un-iVerse?
Re: Come on, Apple (Score:2)
The correct choice is neither option.
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In about a decade, that's going to be the equivalent of saying "not using the Internet" in 2021.
second life with excel and powerpoint ? (Score:5, Funny)
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I was under the impression that already exists under the name 'Eve Online'.
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Looks like Second Life 2022 (history) (Score:2)
Second Life with PowerPoint!
Been there, done that.
In 2007 Second Life was being promoted as a virtual meeting place, not just for socializing, 3D art, and education, but also for business meetings. Besides the text chat system, you could upload images (not just modelling textures, but often PowerPoint slideshows), stream audio, and by this tine they also had stereo spatialized Voice chat (proximity, groups, channels, private).
IBM saw all this and had their own development group to see how to adapt it into an offering that looks almost
A virtual world, like World of Warcraft? (Score:1)
But with Powerpoint? KEK :)
So like that Michael Doglas movie? (Score:2)
We'll be floating around holding 3D file folders, with genuine manila texture?
Or do I get to play Clippy as an avatar or something?
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It's only worth it if we can keep a scotch bottle in our office and grope our secretary.
Hey, at least groping the secretary encouraged class mobility. I'm not sure why requiring us to have the same degree level to mate is more egalitarian ...
Regardless of the features (Score:2)
I don't want to "work and play" in any venue proposed by Microsoft or Facebook. I have a real life, a real job and real hobbies that provide as much real work and real play as I want. I don't need Big Data's profit-oriented, pale imitation of these things.
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I don't want to "work and play" in any venue proposed by Microsoft or Facebook. I have a real life, a real job and real hobbies that provide as much real work and real play as I want. I don't need Big Data's profit-oriented, pale imitation of these things.
OK, Boomer.
Face-to-Face with Clippy and MS Bob? (Score:2)
I fear they'll get blown to bits.
Super (Score:2)
Already Here, and it Sucks (Score:2)
Teams is the best video conferencing software out there, but the rest of its features are awful. It only integrates with Office products, and does so at a massive performance hit. Try to do collaboration on a non-Office file, and you are better off using another cloud offering like DropBox.
Maybe they've made improvements since the first quarter of 2020. But I've avoided us
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Teams is the best video conferencing software out there,
Eh, nothing special on that front. If you go into screen sharing, it's worse than competition. For conversations it's strangely slow to scroll through history. It has odd differences between a 'meeting' and a 'chat', and the 'chat' behaves oddly different than a 'channel', e.g. the blockquote is different between the two... for some reason? Despite their desktop app being mostly just the web ui in an app, it behaves differently (again, different blockquote behavior and no support for controlling a remote
I've read enough William Gibson novels (Score:2)
To have a rough idea how the corporate metaverse is going to play out.
Soon ... (Score:2)
Everyone else is doing it. I guess we'd better follow.
As a poet (Score:2)
I never actually metaverse.
I've seen the future and it's PowerPoint? (Score:2)
I always thought it would be more awesome.
More seriously, I'm guessing that the concept is to have a common platform for communicating but when you look at the great unwashed PowerPoint would be great for memes but I'm not sure about basic communications.
Of course the Microsoft Meta also as Excel, but that goes back to the previous point that it's not something for everybody or for everything.
It will have PowerPoint ... (Score:2)
Welcome to the Tenth Circle of Hell [wikipedia.org] ... :-)
So it's a horror-multiverse? (Score:2)
Interesting.
cartoon world (Score:2)
I do not want to live in a crappy graphics cartoon-like world. I know, I know, its different this time and it's not Second Life, yeah right.
I hate using an audio headset, a VR headset is far from an improvement.
As Shakespeare used to say (Score:2)
I never meta verse I didn't like.
Ok, let's go better (Score:2)
Let's include XPilot, Empire: Wolfpack and a port of SpaceWar! for the games, Joseki and Protege for semantic web development, OPeNDAP for data distribution and dSpace for data distribution. Let's see Microsoft beat that!
Don't forget the best features (Score:2)
Augmented (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, PowerPoint has decades of experience in trying to augment reality
If therev were only (Score:1)
If there are many metaverses (Score:2)
Do their divisions not talk to one another? (Score:1)
Because AltspaceVR is already a Microsoft product...
Good to see (Score:1)