Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times, “Meta Weighs Cuts to Its Metaverse Unit” (gift link):
Meta is considering making cuts to a division in its Reality Labs unit that works on the so-called metaverse, said three employees with knowledge of the matter.
The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10 to 30 percent of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.
Meta does not plan to abandon building the metaverse, the people said. Instead, executives expect to shift the savings from the cuts into investments in its augmented reality glasses, the people said.
Meta confirmed the cuts to the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner broke the news Thursday.
I’m so old that I remember ... checks notes ... four years ago, when Facebook renamed itself Meta in late 2021 with this statement: “Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.” And Mark Zuckerberg, announcing the change, wrote:
But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.
From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.
Many of us never fell for this metaverse nonsense. For example, I’m also old enough to remember just one year later, near the end of Joanna Stern’s on-stage interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak at a 2022 WSJ event, seven months before Vision Pro was announced (at the 29:30 mark):
Stern: You have to finish this sentence, both of you. The metaverse is...
Joz: A word I’ll never use.
He might want to use the word now, just to make jokes.
Om Malik, writing in April this year:
Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the company to rebrand itself as something amazing and fresh.
Lastly, yours truly, linking to Malik’s post:
And so while “Meta” will never be remembered as the company that spearheaded the metaverse — because the metaverse never was or will be an actual thing — it’s in truth the perfect name for a company that believes in nothing other than its own success.
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