Satya Nadella: Microsoft HoloLens will focus on enterprise customers first

Even though Microsoft has been showing HoloLens gaming demos of Minecraft and Halo at events like E3, the company's CEO, Satya Nadella, has confirmed that the first version of the augmented reality headset will focus on the enterprise and business sectors.

In a chat with ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley that was conducted just after his keynote address at the 2015 Worldwide Partner Conference this week, Nadella explained that while HoloLens in gaming is still in the works, the company will try to market it to business customers first:

"I did buy Minecraft to create a new genre of gaming for mixed reality. We bought Minecraft for many reasons: because it's the number one PC app; it's the number one console app; it's the number one paid mobile app on iOS and Android. I wanted a hit game even for the new medium of mixed reality. And we will have that. Gaming will always be a scenario and there will be other entertainment broadly. But, with the V.1 of HoloLens, I want us to push a lot more of the enterprise usage.""In general Microsoft's approach will be always this dual-use focus, or this multi-focus. What we can uniquely do is bridge consumer to enterprise. That's in our DNA. That's why it's even in our mission statement of empowering people and organizations. I want every technology of ours to seek that out. In the HoloLens case, when I look at the interest, it's amazing how many are in hospitals, healthcare, retail. That's where I'm seeing the interest and we'll definitely go after it.".

In the meantime, Microsoft already has an agreement with virtual reality company Oculus to provide an Xbox One controller with every one of its Oculus Rift headsets when they go on sale in 2016, and it will also support viewing Xbox One games via streaming on a Windows 10 PC.

Source: ZDNet

John Callaham