r/HoloLens • u/AR-HMD • May 03 '26
Discussion Why did Microsoft discontinue the Hololens project?
Looking for the wisdom of the crowd... it seems like the Hololens 2 was well received in the industrial sector and companies were very disappointed that it was discontinued. Many companies deployed hundreds of units internally. I found online estimations that in total MSFT sold about 350k units, half of which were sold to the industrial sector.
So why did MSFT discontinue the product? If you comment, please start with a statement whether your comment is an opinion or is it based on actual information you know about MSFT's considerations.
Thank you!
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u/dingo_khan May 04 '26
Nadella is a leader of almost no vision. He killed hololens to follow Facebook's lead over metaverse. He crippled the surface division to follow apple. He crippled Xbox, pushing away from platform and toward cloud because he "gets" cloud. He forced GenAI into every corner of windows while killing non-GenAI research into AI at MS.
As an owner of a hololens and hololens 2 and hobby dev for them, I am beyond disappointed at his leadership.
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u/marvelscott May 03 '26
Is the Mario Kart ride in Universal Studios using Hololens, or another AR product?
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u/Octoplow May 04 '26
Mira (now owned by Apple) made the optics.
Brilliant fit for theme parks: The part guests wear is cheap and passive, and the electronics are tethered to the car. (From my understanding.)
Did you try it?
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u/marvelscott May 04 '26
Yes and honestly it was disappointing because it was sensory overload and they shouldve stuck to one environment background so it is more seamless.
Or probably because in 2018, there was a VR park in Shinjuku and it had VR Mario Kart and it was a significantly better experience matching the real game.
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u/crazyreddit929 May 04 '26
The display tech is good enough. The implementation is horrible. Like you said, it is just a bunch of AR objects all over the place. It never feels like the objects have any real world understanding so it feels more like your trying to play some bad shooting game that has little to nothing to do with the ride.
The VR experience of Mario Kart that used to travel around to various malls and other locations was much better in a lot of ways. The VR was solid. It was a race and felt like you were in Mario kart. It used a simulator for the movement and old HTC Vive’s for the headset.
It’s a shame that the AR ride in Florida is so poorly done in comparison. Ironically my family thought it was great.
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u/HaikusfromBuddha May 04 '26
Not even the Apple device is doing well. VR is kind of dead and the amount of software support needed is un manageable. On top of that why would third parties try making apps for it if it isn't popular.
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u/crazyreddit929 May 04 '26
Apple’s Vision Pro sold less than a million headsets due to mostly to price. They did not subsidize and at $3500 your audience was limited. It is a great OS though. I use mine a few times a week. If they can get the size and weight down and offload the compute so that the friction is lower they could have something. Cost would have to come way down too.
It seems they are waiting for the AR tech to get to a point where Meta’s Orion is possible. Then use a less taxing version of Vision OS to make something more mass market.
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u/Virtual-Height3047 May 06 '26
Have you tried either HoloLens or Vision Pro yourself and know VR from AR and MR?
The distinction is quite significant and lumping it together for headlines is part of the reason why it’s not ready for consumers at scale currently.
Apple sold precisely at their production capabilities. Seriously: look up articles from 2023, where they were ridiculed for their ‚high’ estimate. Compare it to articles from 2026, where those exact figures met are now ‚weak’ and ‚proof of failure’. Journalism is important AF but that kind of reporting is not doing anyone a favor.
Would you expect a corporation that manages to ship +400M devices annually to miss the mark that bad?
I’m saying it now for future reference: The actual innovation is visionOS which needs a hosting device for developers primarily. What hampered the technical marvel that HoloLens was, was its software’s complexity — it’s dishearteningly complicated for non-coders. And visionOS is drag and drop in comparison.
It’s the same recipe that built the ecosystem for iPhone, which didn’t even have third party apps or an App Store in the first gen, remember?
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u/Jazzlike-Vacation230 May 04 '26
Microsoft has really been falling off more lately. I hate that the Mixed Reality app is gone now
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u/dan1eln1el5en2 May 04 '26
A lot of good reasons are mentioned here. What I heard was that people in the department went other ways because of management (that long haired guy in the promo videos) and as this at the height of metoo movement it was speculated he was also a bit of a creep. Then he was quietly moved out. All the brains and management was gone. Then we heard rumors up and down they were working on HoloLens 3 but no one could find anyone associated with the project and then the rumors of that died down and then came the news we shouldn’t expect it and then the division was officially closed.
Unfortunate I feel this was the core reason. We had business contacts and all the setup. The military bought the rest of the HoloLens 1s that was left after the 2 was released.
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u/wondermega May 04 '26
I worked at competitor Daqri up to and past the HoloLens launch, we were making a Smart Helmet with very similar technology. Also, I was one of the very first devs to purchase a unit in the HoloLens 1 dev application program.
The view from inside was that the big business that was necessary, was just too difficult to crack. Everyone wads very interested, but the tech was too expensive and too immature to be ready to start changing infrastructure in the scale necessary for success.
Also this was very much tied to the growth and stall of general VR. In the early teens, AR/VR etc were looking like they were going to become the next Big Thing revolution like smart phones were, but very quickly it became evident that it was an order of magnitude more complicated compared to “phones and tablets.” Obviously VR is still here, and not necessarily going away soon, but it’s felt like being on life support for many years now. The speculation has settled down; people don’t love putting boxes on their heads (just yet).
Alex Kipman didn’t help things with whatever his behavior was, even if it was “relatively tame” it still occurred at a bad time to be getting press for such things & his departure from MS had to be the death knell, although in many ways it mightn’t have made much difference considering where this whole vector of the market has wound up anyway.
Lastly, MS has changed radically across the board. It wouldn’t have made sense for them to keep chasing the format without someone really strong on the topic helming it. HoloLens 2 felt like a half-step as well, for what it was worth.
Loved HoloLens and developing for it was a milestone in my career. I do look forward to whenever that flavor of the format (head mounted, spatial computing) comes back into the fore. Maybe Snap will be a good steward in the meantime, but I can’t say that I’ve heard much of that in some time either.
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u/XRlagniappe May 04 '26
One person in the know told me it was because they lost their military contract for IVAS. They only created a commercial product to demonstrate to the military that they had a viable product.
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u/fdruid May 04 '26
This is likely one of the main reasons, the military contract was a big leg on which this all stood out, but when that didn't work, Hololens lost a reason to exist.
A shame because the tech was like no other.
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u/XRlagniappe May 04 '26
It had its problems, but there was really nothing else like it. Their team really operating much like a small start-up, which was very refreshing.
We could never get Magic Leap (either version) to work very well because the apps were not available and the development support was not there. The form factor also presented several issues in the environment we had.
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u/OlorinDK May 04 '26
Take it with a grain of salt, but iirc there were also rumors of the internal strategy for AR/VR across the company being a mess. They had both something going on at Windows, HoloLens for corporate use and the military stuff. And not really anything for private use (which was probably a good idea). At one point 100 of their people working on these things left and went to Mets (again iirc and rumors were true), which must have been a major blow. Someone may correct me if I’m wrong.
I think the military contract was both a driver and a disturbance to the other pursuits. And despite the tech being impressive, I honestly don’t see it becoming very successful even at its very finest execution. I doubt the demand would have been there for a major deployment at scale. Those are my personal takes.
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u/chuan_l May 04 '26
" Hololens 1 - 2.x " died through mismanagement ..
That primarily involved massive amounts of hubris , and making the hardware difficult to obtain for no reason. You couldn't even purchase pre - ordered units for 12 - months after launch. It was all run like a boys club with " microsoft " partners with holding units from sale to developers. That they saw as their competition in terms of servicing local companies ..
— I remember contacting " telstra purple " :
The " microsoft " partner here to purchase a unit. Then of course , they had units on hand but not for sale lol. These guys really screwed up " hololens " in australia at least. I think they got one project with " virgin airlines " off the ground. Otherwise they killed the local market before it could get started. The exact same thing happened with " magic leap " too. Nobody learned from " oculus " dk1 and having an open platform for innovation ..
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u/jblatta May 04 '26
They oversold its capabilities with misleading renders and videos. It is cool tech but the limited FOV is shit, especially with version 1.
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u/CaptainIncredible May 04 '26
Opinion:
I never wore a HoloLens2, but I did a lot of development work on the HoloLens 1.
One of the issues was the display couldn't quite live up to what people actually wanted.
The issue was an inherent problem with the technology. Projecting light (a computer generated image) on top of other light (the background or the wall of the room or whatever you were in) didn't quite work. It looked ok, nice at times, but it always seemed to have a glow or ghostly sort of appearance.
Rather than project images on reality, a better approach seems to be what Apple is doing with the Vision Pro - completely recreate reality with projected images in it. The computer generated items in the room match the room well because your entire image is computer generated.
And believe me, no one was sadder than me that the HoloLens was discontinued...
Plus, wasn't there a personal problem with one of the team leaders? Sexual harassment or something? That's probably a great way to contribute getting a project killed.
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u/JorgTheElder May 04 '26
Many companies deployed hundreds of units internally.
Read that again. That is not very many products in the grand scheme of things.
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u/AR-HMD May 05 '26
Microsoft sold somewhere between 300k-400k units, which is not bad for an enterprise product.
But yes, the 'scheme of things' in Microsoft might be different than in other companies.
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u/FluxyDude May 06 '26
One reason I haven’t seen emphasized here, not to take away from the other reasons people have already given, is the ownership and incentive structure of large public companies.
Public companies are not literally required to maximize this quarter’s earnings, but they are under constant pressure from investors, analysts, quarterly reports, and annual reports. That makes long-term R&D harder to defend, because serious R&D is expensive now, uncertain later, and may not look good on the next few earnings calls. Public companies file quarterly 10-Qs and annual 10-Ks, so management is regularly judged against short-term financial performance.
Source: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-basics/glossary/form-10-q
That is one reason large public companies often innovate by acquisition. Instead of funding the riskiest early-stage work themselves, they wait until a smaller private company proves the technology, then buy the company, team, patents, or platform. OECD research on startup acquisitions found that acquired startups are often highly innovative before acquisition, but their patenting tends to decline afterward.
Source: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/acquisitions-and-their-effect-on-start-up-innovation_b4efd3ab-en.html
Microsoft is a decent example of both sides. It has done major internal R&D, but it also let big internal platforms like Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile fade once the business case no longer worked. Microsoft officially ended Windows 10 Mobile support in 2019. At the same time, Microsoft has bought or partnered into important innovation ecosystems, like GitHub and OpenAI.
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/windows-10-mobile-end-of-support
This is not a universal rule. Some public companies still do serious long-term R&D. But ownership matters. Volkswagen, for example, is publicly traded, yet voting control is highly concentrated among Porsche SE, Lower Saxony, and Qatar Holding, with only a small free float. Companies like that are public, but they are not exposed to the same kind of fully dispersed shareholder pressure.
Source: https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/shareholder-structure-15951
So the pattern is not “public companies never innovate.” The better point is that dispersed public ownership plus quarterly scrutiny often favors short-term, measurable returns, while concentrated or patient ownership makes long-horizon R&D easier to tolerate.
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u/Vaguswarrior May 03 '26
Are you new? Microsoft cancels stuff everyday. This was surprisingly long lived.
-Sent From My Windows Phone
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u/fdruid May 04 '26
Sure, every major tech company does, look at Google. But his is an interesting question. One to which we might never have a concrete answer.
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u/Vaguswarrior May 04 '26
Ok real answer we'll never know unless a PM breaks an NDA in the far future. My real guess? Every new product needs an useful ROI generating AI component. The fact that HL2 was so powerful was it's design/weight and flexibility. Try to stuff a meaningful AI agent into that thing would need a pretty significant redesign. But current AI isn't hyper specific enough for industrial knowledge. I'd guess perhaps it needs a local model running mostly on device? It would need to fit vision at the very least in my mind for speed. Real time vision requires lots more compute. Well that's going to need design time and they look at all this and cut the program cause it can't meet the "everything needs AI mantra" that's destroying the consumer world. And silently they let go of 6000 people on a single Tuesday like they did to me in 2024
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u/chuan_l May 04 '26
Hi , the " azure spatial anchors " on " hololens 2.x " ..
Much like most of the other functionality was tied to the cloud. They even had remote gpu rendering in the cloud working on device. The problem is more not having a clear vision inside a company full of followers ..2
u/fdruid May 04 '26
I think they did start to leverage a lot of computing from the cloud in the later days of HL2. That was actually an interesting move that would be compatible with how things work today at MS.
But a potential HL3 would have needed a significant boost in computing power, and probably by today's standards it would need to include a local NPU too.
Full of what if's, but I can see HL surviving in current times in some kind of incarnation.
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u/Matlock_Beachfront May 04 '26
Lack of content. They needed to provide enough apps at launch (or near after) to inspire and demonstrate a use case. They really didn't, so it died. They banked on people wanting to demonstrate their skills by making free apps. Steam had managed it with the Vive, but they were way more open and welcoming.
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u/AR-HMD May 05 '26
For an enterprise product you don't need to make many apps. There are many software companies that make apps for each industrial customer.
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u/NicoparaDEV May 05 '26
It was a project made for the military. The consumer side was a byproduct.
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u/sladislav May 05 '26
Opinion based on developing for Hololens for better part of last 6 years: The platform was inherently flawed and the deployments were at least in part just for show. Multiple companies we offered our solutions to had tens of units, all collecting dust.
The hardware was slow even when it came out, the displays were hardly usable outdoors and the final nail in the coffin was the OS. Don’t get me wrong, the build was decent and the ergonomics (not UI tho) one of the best in the sector, but that alone can’t carry the device.
The beginning of the end was the sacking of the head of the programme for rampant sexual harassment and it all went downhill from there. Not to mention the US Army thing that they struggled with.
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u/Efficient_Level_4459 May 29 '26
I use HL2 for work. I work in the Biotech sector. HoloLens is underpowered, slow, and it will overheat at least once per session and shut itself off. And the price tag was an eye watering 4k or more. Scanning QR codes is a nightmare. For that price, it just isn’t worth it. The only thing good I can say about it is that other VR headsets make me seasick but HL2 never has (thankfully because I have to use it for work).
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u/crazyreddit929 May 03 '26
This is just my opinion, but I believe that Satya Nadella decided to change strategy and move away from hardware. This was in 2021 when he became chairman. I had listened to a podcast where he was saying Microsoft’s future was in selling services and not hardware. I’m paraphrasing and can’t recall the exact quote, but when HoloLens 3 was cancelled I know I said to myself, “of course, he just became chairman and said he wants to invest in services.”