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
