MS did the entire VR headset partnership thing, got some very good headsets out (for the time), and then just dropped the project and put it into maintenance mode. If they had kept working on it, it would've done well, as it wasn't falling flat on its face, it was just getting going when they dropped it.
They made the weird business decision to drop the products they had third party cooperation and an enthusiastic userbase for, in favor of an experimental product (Hololens) that ended up only being affordable to businesses and which afaik has never really taken off in the same way as WMR had been.
Nobody's tried anything like the broad scale pitch Meta is making here. Everyone else has tackled the high end or specialized use cases. Meta's really the only company that's tried to make a true OS play that is meant to be accessible to everyone. Based on that alone I just don't think you can extrapolate from "X failed so this has already been tried". Nobody has tried what Meta is doing.
IMO the issues Microsoft had weren't unexpected. If you look at the disaster that was their US military Hololens project it turns out a fairly significant portion of the population experiences motion sickness and other fundamental issues[0].
This is a hard problem to solve and from what I understand it is similar to issues that are screened for in specialties. For example - fighter pilots and astronauts are screened for all kinds of fundamental things:
- Vision
- Tolerance to motion sickness
- Tolerance to Gs
- Tolerance to claustrophobia (for flight suits, tight cockpits, etc)
If you don't have 20/20 vision (or better), puke all the time in sims, and freak out when put in a flight suit you're just not a fighter pilot, astronaut, etc. Once you make that cut then you train on improving what you fundamentally have and even then wash-out rates are high.
With the Hololens project the goal was to strap a Hololens on pretty much any random soldier. If some fairly large portion of the population just can't make it work the utility and value of the project drops to zero. Imagine standardizing on a gun sight or other key technology that just won't work for even 1/10 of your (already limited recruits), potentially even for otherwise elite soldiers.
I think they realized they will have similar fundamental issues in the enterprise - the utility of a Teams meeting with everyone in Hololens drops pretty significantly when a non-zero portion of employees get sick after a few minutes.
I'm not sure how these issues with the technology can be overcome. Sure, if some gamers can make it work that's cool but that doesn't provide the overall value to the technology MS was hoping for.
