What They Say
Meta has fired 11,000 staff as it deals with the challenges of reduced revenue and tougher times for the big tech companies. Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the process and said that he had made a mistake in believing that the boost in online from the pandemic would stick once the crisis was over.
Zuckerberg’s email about the changes is reproduced here.
What We Think
I wasn’t going to cover this story, as you will probably have heard it too often, already, but I thought it would be worthwhile to say that although I track dozens of news channels that are covering this story, I haven’t found any clues as to whether this big cut will be across the whole of the business or will be focused on the Reality Labs operation which has lost so much this year. The coverage I have seen suggests that the spread will be over all activities including Reality Labs.
Zuckerberg is stuck here – he has pinned the whole future of Meta on the Metaverse, so to change tack on that really would mean a dramatic leadership shift.
By the way, in a DD the other day, I said that “Meta has been working on many aspects of VR and AR display use for years”. Jon Peddie pointed out that at the moment, Meta is not spending money on AR. I could get into an argument about whether passthrough-VR is AR, but it’s a fair point that Meta’s focus is on VR rather than AR at the moment. However, I would argue that if the end game for Meta is a metaverse, to be as pervasive as Zuckerberg would like, it will have to be based on AR.
Of course, I could have said that I just meant Meta Materials Inc, which is working on AR optics 🙂 (Meta Materials Joins Lasar Alliance For Augmented Reality Wearable Devices) (BR)
