Here we go with another "leaked" Meta/Reality Labs memo from CTO / Zuckerberg right-hand-man Andrew Bosworth, though unlike last week's happy jazz hands, this one has a more dire angle:
2025: The Year of Greatness
... We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure...
You don't need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I've observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee.
You can read the whole thing below (via Business Insider's Jyoti Mann) but my strong interpretation to all this wording is:
Start strongly boosting our metaverse KPIs or get fired this year.
... because the only time the leaders of a large company talk about the value of small teams is when a huge staff is about to become a tinier one. Also, I've personally heard multiple insiders talk about a coming cut, recently -- and have been hearing about Reality Labs' "design by committee" problem since roughly 2019.
It's tragic that Meta's staff is now bearing the brunt of the very fundamental mistakes that Zuckerberg and Bosworth themselves made over the last 10 years -- especially when these were foreseeable errors at the time.
To highlight just a few I've followed closely:
Zuckerberg/Bosworth spent billions to mass market VR, without researching (or knowing) why VR tends to make females literally vomit:
[Microsoft's] danah boyd is not an obscure researcher, but frequently cited in mainstream media and tech news sites. So when she ended her 2014 essay with a call for researchers across Silicon Valley to follow up on her initial findings, I assumed this would immediately happen.
It did not.
Reached while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, she told me that few if any VR industry members contacted her after the essay was published. Neither did they even follow up with her in 2017, when a study published in Experimental Brain Research found that when women volunteers played a game in an Oculus VR headset, 78 percent of them experienced nausea. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “[Oculus and Meta] did not pursue any of those research questions.”
Over the years, I’ve asked several senior Meta staffers about this, [including Zuckerberg/Bosworth's PR team] and have received no adequate reply.
Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not follow the advice of former Facebook VP / Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, Jim Purbrick, and other virtual world veterans they hired.
If you've been following the news about Facebook/Meta's metaverse project lately, you'll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds, leading the company to hastily add an avatar "boundary" system...
"I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row," Jim Purbrick tells me, with evident frustration, even sending along the talk he gave on the subject at Facebook's own conference back in 2016. "I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn't reach every part of the organization, sadly."
Read more here, and, of course, on Ondrejka in great detail, in my book.
Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not clearly define the Metaverse, or explain their conception to their own employees.
According to a survey conducted last month by Blind, the popular anonymous messaging app for company staff, confidence in the Metaverse and Meta's efforts dropped sharply last year [2022]. That's compared to a November 2021 Blind survey where the very same questions were asked:
To the statement, "I believe Meta will successfully build the metaverse" (above), only 50% of employees answered yes. In November 2021, 77% of staff answered in the affirmative... 56% say their own CEO has not explained the metaverse clearly.
Or, you know, read Snow Crash, which defines the Metaverse with biblical specificity.
In a funny irony, Bosworth pinged me on Twitter when I pointed out that Meta seemed to be walking away from the Metaverse... in a statement he wrote that actually shows little knowledge about the concept. The painful irony is his own employees will now have to labor under the gun of that misapprehension.
Anyway, read his whole statement below.
2025: The Year of Greatness
Next year is going to be the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs. We have the best portfolio of products we've ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.
I've been re-reading "Insanely Great," Steven Levy's history of the Macintosh computer. If you haven't read it the book chronicles the incredible efforts of individuals working in teams of 1-3 to build a device that more than any other marked the consumer era of personal computing. What I find most fascinating about it is the way that even people who left the program on bad terms (it was not particularly well managed) speak about the work they did there with an immense sense of pride. There was a widespread cultural expectation, set by none other than a young Steve Jobs, that the work needed to be "insanely great."
On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren't sitting around celebrating because know it isn't enough. We haven't actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.
Greatness is our opportunity. We live in an incredible time of technological achievement and have placed ourselves at the center of it with our investments. There is a very good chance most of us will never get a chance like this again.
Greatness is a choice. Many people have ben at the precipice of opportunity and failed to achieve. For the most part they failed to even challenge themselves.
You should be doing the best work of your career right now. You should be pushing yourself to grow where needed and doubling down on your strengths. When you look back on this time I want you to feel like you did everything in your power to make the most of it.
You don't need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I've observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee. You should be so focused on results that being in a bunch of docs or meetings is too frustrating to bear.
The path is clear. You don't need to come up with a bunch of new ideas to do this great work. Most people in the organization just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed. It is about operational excellence. It is about master craftsmanship. It is about filling our products with "Give A Damn". This is about having pride in our work.
I will close with an Arnold Glasow quote: "Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." 2025 is the year. Let's be on fire.
Via Upload VR, which has more background.
> Start strongly boosting our metaverse KPIs or get fired this year.
I agree to some extent, but I think you shouldn't use the term "metaverse" when summarizing the words of someone who you don't agree with about the definition of the term "metaverse".
Here is my reading of this paragraph (my emphasis):
> Next year is going to be the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs. We have the best portfolio of products we've ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.
This is explicitly directed at teams working on MR and Horizon Worlds, which apparently have to prove their worth this year. Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading this as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from MR and Horizon Worlds towards AR+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.
Posted by: Martin K. | Thursday, February 06, 2025 at 03:12 AM
Why to proclamations from people that high in companies so often sound like they're from a cult leader? Such a bizarre way of talking to people.
Posted by: wsa | Thursday, February 06, 2025 at 12:02 PM
They still don't get it and they never will. These over-highly paid senior people so often think because they are highly paid they know better than everyone else, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. To be honest, if I was Zuck the first person I would have fired is Bosworth. In many other companies someone who performed as poorly as him and displaid such an abysmal lack of knowledge about virtual worlds and their history would have never even got the job. I know I'm being bitchy, but when you see some of the amazing things users and hobbyists have been able to create with a tiny, tiny fraction of the resources Bosworth had / has, you can't help but feel frustrated. Thank you to Meta for really good affordable headsets, but forget the whole Horizon world thing and leave it to those with more experience and imagination.
Posted by: Kaylee West | Thursday, February 06, 2025 at 06:33 PM