With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic:
Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo] as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from mixed reality and Horizon Worlds towards augmented reality +AI glasses (at the end of this year or in 2026). (And I'm sure that Meta will find a way to describe this new focus as an evolution of their vision of the Metaverse. Maybe the new/true/real Metaverse or whatever. They'll come up with something.)
If this shift of focus towards AR glasses and AI is already planned, why not just announce it? I assume the purpose of this whole exercise (and its predictable outcome) is to rationalize the scaling down of the MR and Horizon Worlds teams, prevent or shut down internal discussions about this change, and give some employees a chance to leave or switch teams before they are fired.
But I'm biased because Meta's VR strategy never made much sense to me. Thus, I guess, I'll just wait, watch, and limit my engagement with the Quest platform.
"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea.
As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.
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