The search VR's "killer app" continues.

Microsoft's Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 dropped this week, with a heavy focus on "Mixed Reality" - Microsoft's attempt to rebrand VR into something that might actually appeal to consumers. Mixed Reality has a couple of advantages: MR headsets are entering the market now with signifcantly lower price points and PC hardware requirements than the likes of Oculus' Rift or HTC's Vive, and at least the potential to be used for Augmented Reality (AR) applications as well as VR.

Much like VR, though, MR suffers from a lack of a reason to exist. MR headsets must be tethered to a PC (or laptop, if your laptop's specs are sufficiently beefy), which will limit its usefulness for AR applications; and VR still lacks the quantitatively new experience which will sell it to consumers. And, yes, I'm including the new Cliff House feature in that assessment, as reported by Popular Science:

The home base for Mixed Reality is a virtual home called the Cliff House and makes navigating windows more like walking around a swanky dwelling with a nice view. Want to watch a movie? Head into the home theater. Want to use regular windows apps? Head over to the virtual desktop and get a 3D Windows experience.

This is neither quantitatively new, nor particularly useful. Bumptop* have been doing interactive 3D work spaces for years, something which Cliff House just expands from a potentially useful desk (where everything you might want to work with is conveniently located in one work area) into a much less useful structure, forcing you to walk around your virtual house in order to do different things, a setup with completely ignores the way modern consumers use PCs.

Por ejemplo, right now, I've got music playing in the background while game updates download in a second application, all while I compose this post in a third. On a desktop, that's easy to manage, because they're all in one place -- firing them up took just a few mouse clicks, opening three windows between which I can move back and forth with a simple ⊞ Win+Tab ↹. This took only seconds... in a standard GUI, with a keyboard and mouse interface. In the Cliff House, though, I'd have to waste extra time "walking" from room to room in my virtual house just to get everything started.

Also, while representing your PC's file structure as a Cliff House might be mildly interesting from a technical standpoint, if not very useful from a practical one, virtually touring a house is not a new activity; architects and real estate agents have been using virtual tours for years already, with no VR required. So, not only is Cliff House not useful, it's not quantitatively new, either; it's just a more elaborate (and less useful) Bumptop, with VR providing some qualitative enhancement. Just like every other VR application.

Cliff House is not going to become the new way you interface with your PC, and the FCU's MR package doesn't include any other new use for the technology, either, something which Popular Science acknowledge:

Right now, the challenge is finding enough interesting stuff to actually do in Mixed Reality. There are a few games out there like Halo Recruit VR, but overall support is spotty.  

Mixed Reality, much like Virtual Reality, is still not actually a thing. At least, it's not a thing that consumers want or need, and is therefore unlikely to be a thing which sells VR headsets. VR's "killer app" still waits to be found... assuming it exists at all.

* Bumptop, BTW, is more of a curiosity than anything else; it's been around for years, but hasn't really caught on, for the simple reason that it's not very useful, either. There's a reason why keyboards are still so popular, people: they're simple, effective, efficient, intuitive, and provide unparalleled responsiveness combined with audio/tactile feedback that makes each keypress an intrinsically satisfying experience. Combine with a mouse, which provides drag + drop simplicity when you might want or need it, and you really don't need any other way to work with your PC; there's a reason why Xerox PARC used this control scheme for their early GUI, why Apple swiped them for the Macintosh, why PCs followed suit, and why the combination of keyboard and mouse has prevailed over all other challengers for nearly four decades since.

With the Fall Creators Update less than three weeks away, over a quarter of Windows 10 customers don't have Spring's CU yet.

I'd already blogged about Microsoft's claims about the Creators Update's reliability, but Wayne Williams at betanews has a pretty good take, too.

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update is set to begin its rollout in a matter of weeks, yet over a quarter (27.5 percent) of Windows 10 users still haven’t received the Creators Update.

According to the latest figures from AdDuplex, while the Creators Update found its way on to another 7.5 percent of computers this month to give it a 72.5 percent share, it’s still well short of the 91.2 percent that the Anniversary Update reached before the Creators Update was released. AdDuplex warns that as a result of slow rollouts like this, fragmentation will only increase in the future.

[...]

A week ago, Microsoft proudly announced that the Creators Update is much more reliable than the Anniversary Update, with a "39 percent total reduction in operating system and driver stability issues" and the number of support calls diminishing "significantly." But as I pointed out at the time, a large portion of that improvement can be attributed to the fact that many Windows 10 users simply don't have it.

And this is the point where I remind you that the Fall Creators Update, a.k.a. version 1709, is launching a full month late. With over a full month of extra time in which they were rolling out the Creators Update, they're still nowhere near where they should be, or need to be. 

Can someone remind me again why Windows-As-A-Service was supposed to be such a great way to receive Microsoft Windows from the Gods of OS? Because I don't see it.

So, about that SteamVR support...

Remember just over a week ago, when Microsoft were hyping the "fact" that their shiny new Mixed Reality headsets would be compatible with Steam VR? Apparently that's actually not so much the truth. Surprise!

From Sean Chan at MSPowerUser:

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Windows Mixed Reality won’t support content from SteamVR on its initial launch. According to German site ComputerBase, Windows Mixed Reality’s communication director Greg Sullivan stated that support for SteamVR won’t be available on the launch day. In fact, Sullivan mentioned that the companies have just started working on the integration — and it’ll probably take a while before Windows Mixed Reality users can actually run content from SteamVR on their new headsets.

When it comes to gaming  (or any other software) development, an old adage is that you should always buy a product for what it has now rather than based on promises of future features. Despite the number of software launch partners Microsoft announced, the lack of support for SteamVR’s large catalogue from the outset has just made the product a lot less interesting, and will probably mean I will hang on a few months to see if it will really materialize before spending hundreds of dollars.

Microsoft had already walked back the SteamVR announcement a bit by announcing that the new MR headsets would require Windows 10's Fall Creators Update to work (creating an obvious incompatibility with SteamVR, which has no such restriction), this isn't too surprising, but it is a little disappointing. It's difficult to imagine what sort of MR/SteamVR integration will even be possible, as long as Microsoft are determined to use MR as a tool to drive adoption of their walled-garden Windows 10 ecosystem... something which isn't in Valve's interests at all.

For VR, it's really the worst of all worlds. The first generation of hardware will be rendered obsolete by the new MR headsets, but the new MR headsets won't be able to build their user base, either, thanks to Microsoft's pathological monopolistic tendencies. The Fall Creators Update is already launching a month late (in October, and not on-schedule in September), and if the Anniversary and Creators Updates are any indication, the FCU will take months to be "fully" rolled out. Making MR inoperable without the FCU puts any potential MR customer in a position of having to wait months for their OS to be updated enough to even work with the hardware... and then more months of waiting for the hardware to be compatible with the biggest available library of VR content. It's idiotic. Microsoft literally couldn't have planned it any worse.

But, then, we are talking about Microsoft, here. We really shouldn't be at all surprised, at this point.

Fall Update to make your PC as powerful as an Xbox?

I just came across this priceless tidbit from Paul Younger at PC Invasion:

The next Windows 10 update will be the Fall Creators Update and it’s coming on 17 October. Along with a lot dribble about how they want to make Windows 10 a “platform that inspires your creativity”, there is a section on gaming.

The update for gamers reads:

The fuel that often inspires creativity is play. With the Fall Creators Update, we’ve updated Game Mode, which allows your games to use the full processing power of your device as if it was an Xbox game console, right from a new button on the Game bar. And to take advantage of this power, we have a fantastic lineup of Xbox Play Anywhere games coming including, Cuphead, Forza Motorsport 7, Super Lucky’s Tale and Middle-earth: Shadow of War. And, if you love these Xbox play anywhere games, coming on November 7 you can play them on the most powerful console on the planet, Xbox One X.

That’s right, they want to make my PC perform just like an Xbox console. I hope to god my PC doesn’t perform like an Xbox when this update lands, PC gamers have PCs so the gaming experience is specifically not like a Xbox. Microsoft sometimes really don’t get it when it comes to the PC, we don’t give two hoots about the Xbox One.

Well said, sir. Well said.

Please take a second and click through to the original article. There's not much more to it, but it was so succinctly put that I think Mr. Younger has earned a few extra clicks.

Today in Windows 10...

We're definitely into the summer doldrums, with very little of anything happening, but here are two tidbits that caught my eye today.

First up, from Mike Wheatley at siliconANGLE:

Although Microsoft Corp. probably deserves a ten out of ten for the efforts its made to make Windows 10 more enterprise friendly, it turns out the operating system is only slightly more popular than the aging Windows XP among business users.

That’s the main takeaway from a new survey on Windows 10 adoption by information technology network Spiceworks Inc. The survey found that Windows XP, which is by now most likely riddled with security holes as it no longer receives regular updates, is still being run on 11 percent of business PCs, down from 14 percent in March. That compares to just 13 percent of business PCs running Windows 10.

“Despite the gains in Windows 10 penetration, the absolute share of computers running the OS remains relatively low,” said Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks.

Both operating systems remain a long way behind Microsoft’s legendary Windows 7 operating system, which is running on 68 percent of all enterprise PCs, Spiceworks found. However, Windows 10 does at least come second with its 13 percent adoption rate, and its overall share has improved markedly in recent months – back in March, it was only running on nine percent of business computers, Spiceworks said.

Ouch.

Bear in mind that Windows 10 is the future of Microsoft, on which they've basically bet the farm at this point; with general usage languishing at or below the 26% mark for months, Microsoft was counting on business adoption to make their Windows 10 strategy work. If these numbers are to be believe, then that isn't happening yet, at least not in any big way; the fact that Windows 10 is only finally outperforming the nearly sixteen year old Windows XP, after everything that Microsoft has done, must surely speak to some significant underlying issues. I doubt that the recent revelation that older hardware may not be supported by future Windows 10 builds will help, either.

I'll admit, I am looking forward to the end-of-July NetMarketShare stats, but I'm not expecting Microsoft to make any changes to their approach this year. Thousands of annual layoffs and stagnant market growth for their flagship product notwithstanding, the markets seem generally bullish on MSFT these days, which gives Satya Nadella all the cover he needs to keep right on failing.

That's all for tidbit one, though. Tidbit two is getting a lot more coverage, like this piece in The Reg: