70
Hello,
Microsoft offers the guides product, yet it has two partners, such as PTC (vuforia product) & ScopeAR (worklink product) that both sell similar products.
For those of you now using guides, did you consider these products and was it difficult to choose?
Is microsoft and guides competing with these partners in this product area?
Barry,
I appreciate your thoughts. I believe PTC bought & Qualcomm sold Vuforia because PTC at the time had the best vision for Vuforia in terms of use cases. And I would agree that it was smart on both sides to make that sale. The issue is PTC, while having good use cases, sees it more from a narrower engineering/construction/development type of tool.
Looking out at the marketplace, I agree that Guides and Guide like clones will be both lucrative and valuable to the AR ecosystem. But I think, believe, that Microsoft realizes that Guides might be their next "Excel" if they nurture it correctly.
If you step back and understand Guides beyond just what it is as a single app and appreciate it for its technical concept it becomes more like Excel. Excel is a spreadsheet, a database, an analysis program, a visual chart program. I get Excel's original purpose but its flexibility spawned a of other features and products. I think Guides at its core can be similar.
Ken
I am very grateful for this feedback.
Guides is attractive because I assume it will be relatively easy to integrate into our existing enterprise, including the science project of getting a hololens2 to authenticate via AAD for both our internal systems as well as Azure GCC HIGH. Users will easily be able to access their OneDrive for business (on GCC HIGH), etc. Also, I bet the decimation of CAD assets into guides will be nice, as they can leverage azure cloud for processing, etc.
but...
a contrary thought is related to QUALCOMM \ Vuforia. You might be aware that QUALCOMM is the founder of Vuforia and the studio product, but then they sold it to PTC. I think they sold it because they wanted to "seed" the marketplace with tech demonstrations of AR on mobile, so they could then sell more mobile chips - their core business. I admit it is a stretch, but I am a bit worried that Guides might be a product that is "Seeding" The marketplace and that Microsoft might be sharing development guidance with PTC and others as they invest in guides - once Microsoft deems the market mature, they might discontinue guides and let PTC, Scope AR take that market. presumably Microsoft benefits cuz PTC and others will deploy on Azure and provide continuous cloud revenue
I'm not saying this is likely but it is a thought...
Barry,
What you are asking is an astute question. In terms of PTC (vuforia) we did look into this and frankly there was several issues with issues being cost, platform, and knowledge required to build it. Basically its costly if you want it to be more development friendly. Or cheap but you build it yourself. FYI, our engineers use PTC CAD products for their engineering development so we are are very familiar with PTC and still said no.
ScopeAR is a pretty nice product and it would behoove the Guides team to keep a close, consistent eye on what they doing in terms of features.
But lets touch the heart of some of these issues. Internally at Microsoft you have to acknowledge that the team that builds the Hololens is different from the team that builds Guides, which is different from the team building Remote Assist. Yes the silos are real. So hopefully, there is somebody at the top of MIcrosoft that can both see the Hololens and the Mixed Reality teams and guide them.
But the reason we passed on ScopeAR was more of a long game picture. Microsoft is vastly bigger, with an incredible war chest. Which means "likely" longer term support, spending, and focus on Guides (it still runs on HL1's). They have the money to even buy ScopeAR. And from what I can tell, Microsoft got so badly burned by missing the mobile phone revolution that hopefully that keeping AR development is very important to them long term.
So as an enterprise buyer, I do need to take this into account if I am trying to roll out a AR program. I mean what if Google buys ScopeAR and then they 12 months later shut them down?
The second thing as an enterprise buyer of AR solutions, is the integration with other microsoft's products for their AR ecosystem. Whether that's another app like Field Service or PowerBi but it can also include better data access and integration. Those integrations often are deeper and more solid than 3rd part programs. So just like certain Apple created apps work the best in their closed ecosystem, we did Guides for the Hololens ecosystem.
Hope this helps.
Ken
Stay up to date on forum activity by subscribing. You can also customize your in-app and email Notification settings across all subscriptions.
#1
André Arnaud de Cal...
291,280
Super User 2024 Season 2
#2
Martin Dráb
230,235
Most Valuable Professional
#3
nmaenpaa
101,156
Share
Report
All responses (
Answers (