Microsoft wants to get its feet back in the real world and as such the company now seems convinced that the Metaverse is not the future. It is true that the economic downturn is pushing many companies to return to pragmatism. In the tech world, the return to pragmatism is often synonymous with layoffs. Microsoft has just announced nearly 10,000 layoffs and in this batch is the entirety of a group set up just four months ago around the Metaverse. The objective of the latter was to help customers use the Metaverse in industrial environments. It seems that the 100 employees of the Industrial Metaverse Core team, which was specially created last October, have all been laid off. At the same time, several industry sources have confirmed that Microsoft’s layoffs also affect all the teams behind the HoloLens, AltSpaceVR and MRTK (Mixed Reality Tool Kit) projects.
After months of hype and smoky marketing speeches, many players now seem determined to get back to basics. However, others claim that the Metaverse is not dead even if nothing really new has been presented or published in the last few months. And that’s the paradox: no one is really able to define the contours of the Metaverse. Until the last few months, it was a concept that could take any form as long as it excited speculative and stock market circles. To echo Microsoft’s decisions, we now know that Mark Zuckerberg ‘s group has swallowed up nearly $14 billion in losses on the Metaverse division in 2022. Figures that must reason in the heads of many companies.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe the positioning of the big industry leaders on this subject. So if Microsoft is abandoning (maybe only temporarily) the Metaverse, it seems to be active in the field of AI, with the partial acquisition of ChatGPT, which it intends to use in the Edge browser. Google is also making significant investments in this field. From the outside, these positions give an impression of opportunism and not of real strategy.
It’s a good bet that these tech giants will do a complete about-face again if the Metaverse hype starts to take off again…
