>It has absolutely zero technical superiority over everything else out right now.
Not necessarily in the enterprise market. Based off my experience, their enterprise softwares are vastly superior other alternatives.
May I also mention the advancements of Kinect? The ability to scan and display with a great deal of accuracy: your body skeleton, your heart rate, muscle maps, etc is pretty awesome. I find whatever comes out of Microsoft Research to be very exciting. However the truth is most are killed even before they make it to the market (remember Microsoft Courier?), thanks to their internal politics.
Yeah, so vastly superior that they can't even convince their enterprise customers to adopt their latest platforms (phones, tabets) and operating system (Windows 8).
Also, do you realize that the Kinect technology was developed outside of Microsoft? It was invented by an Israeli company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrimeSense
Microsoft just licensed their technology for use in the Kinect. So if you consider licensing someone else's inventions as, "the most technologically advanced" then yeah; Kinect is pretty good as far as game-playing technology goes.
>Yeah, so vastly superior that they can't even convince their enterprise customers to adopt their latest platforms (phones, tabets) and operating system (Windows 8).
If you have ever worked in a corporate world, you will realize the main motto is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Windows 8 doesn't add anymore to their value that what XP and Windows 7 does. Also, Windows 8 was built with consumer centric point of view.
>do you realize that the Kinect technology was developed outside of Microsoft?
The chip was but not most of the software. There has been a lot of work that went into it. As someone who is interested in Imaging Algorithms, what is the next best alternative? OpenCV? It hasn't moved a square peg in almost a decade and I am glad this stagnation is ending or changing because of Kinect.
Did you know Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Driverless Car, heck even android was all built on top of already bought technologies? However, there was a lot of work put into them just like the Kinect and I am not going to belittle that.
Not necessarily in the enterprise market. Based off my experience, their enterprise softwares are vastly superior other alternatives.
May I also mention the advancements of Kinect? The ability to scan and display with a great deal of accuracy: your body skeleton, your heart rate, muscle maps, etc is pretty awesome. I find whatever comes out of Microsoft Research to be very exciting. However the truth is most are killed even before they make it to the market (remember Microsoft Courier?), thanks to their internal politics.