But now it appears that Redmond CEO Satya Nadella has been dropping some hints as to when its augmented reality eyewear will show up.

Talking to the BBC, Microsoft's supreme dalek said developers and enterprise users to get the first version of HoloLens "within the next year."

This means the chances of you owning one by Christmas are about as likely as an Apple fanboy admitting that his iPhone has less security than an Android one or that Steve Jobs didn't invent the tablet.

It's not clear when a personal version will launch, but Nadella describes the overall technology as a "5-year journey" that will eventually branch out to other fields.

This could mean 2020 which is quite a good year for announcing visual technology, but it could also mean that Microsoft will have it established by that point. In the same way it established tablets.

Hopefully the software will be better than what we have now.