Last month when Philip Rosedale announced he was drastically scaling back High Fidelity-sponsored content due to slow VR headset sales, this latest announcement by Philip on the HiFi blog was probably, sadly, inevitable:
If you had asked me when we started the company in 2014, I’d have said that by now there would be several million people using HMDs daily, and we’d be competing with both big and small companies to provide the best platform—but I was wrong. Daily headset use is only in the tens of thousands, almost all for entertainment and media consumption, with very little in the way of general communication, work, or education.
... [W]e have made the very hard decision today to reduce our team by 25%, meaning that 20 people will be leaving us who have made great contributions to High Fidelity, and whom we will greatly miss. They are brilliant and talented and I hope that this message will reach places where they can quickly find new homes.
"Social VR in HMDs won’t really work until we can do everything in them, including work and messaging," as Philip told me last month. "We can’t multi-task in VR yet, and that’s a real challenge." And yes, he's bearish in the short term despite the Oculus Quest, saying, "The Quest and [Vive] Focus are the future, but it is still going to take a few years, so we have to plan for that."
As Philip also alluded to last month, this doesn't mean he's giving up his dream of building the metaverse -- instead, he's focusing the company on building a cross-platform virtual world with an emphasis on remote meetings:
Readers on Slack & High Fidelity's Shift from VR; Philip Rosedale Q&A Soon!
Last Friday I had a great chat with Philip Rosedale over High Fidelity's recent layoffs and shift away from being so VR-focused in the short term, in order to build a kind of Slack-meets-Zoom-meets-virtual worlds for work app -- I'll run the full conversation in coming days. Until then, here's some reader responses to those moves (and my replies to those replies):
In point of fact, Slack interoperates with a lot of common existing services, unifying them into a single shared virtual work space. And nowadays, it's hardly limited to Silicon Valley employees: It now counts over 10 million daily active users and is used by groups in 65 of the Fortune 100 companies.
Another update from Slack's blog, in opposition to another reader saying, "Maybe Philip opening up an office in Tokyo while seeing the world from a different perspective would help him and the project." The implication being High Fidelity's new move is coming from the Valley bubble. But as it happens:
Continue reading "Readers on Slack & High Fidelity's Shift from VR; Philip Rosedale Q&A Soon!" »
Posted on Monday, May 13, 2019 at 03:07 PM in Comment of the Week, High Fidelity | Permalink | Comments (8)
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