This reminds me of the 360 live stream camera by Microsoft Research which also died. Not many products made by Microsoft Research seems to ever be commercially fruitful.
“The weird afterlife of Kinect” is that it became FaceID and is on hundreds of millions of beloved devices. By that metric the Kinect is a ridiculous success as a hardware innovation.
And yet, a lot are well received. People still miss the Zune and are disappointed that Microsoft didn't continue with it.
But then, the dedicated music player industry pretty much died when smartphones became a thing. There was Windows Mobile for a while which also did some interesting innovations (I was impressed by the animations) but which probably did not meet expectations. A shame, it was probably the strongest contender for a 3rd party in the mobile OS ecosystem. Various other phone manufacturers built their own OS but ultimately conceded that it's a big effort.
