Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Microsoft recently disbanded the industrial meta-universe team, which was set up just four months ago, which is the fourth meta-universe division to be adjusted after announcing plans to lay off 10,000 people.

While Microsoft developed ChatGPT with great fanfare, it laid off the meta-cosmos team in a low profile.

On February 9, The Information reported that Microsoft had disbanded the Industrial Meta-Universe team, which was set up four months ago, and that all 100 members of the team had been fired, including two former founders. The next day, there were media reports that Microsoft began to lay off staff in divisions such as Surface devices, hybrid reality hardware (MR) HoloLens and Xbox.

At the beginning of this year, Satyanadella, president of Microsoft, announced by full letter that he would cut 10,000 jobs, accounting for about 4.5% of the total workforce. Soon after, Microsoft announced the closure of AltspaceVR, a virtual reality social platform that the company acquired in 2017, and the team was also laid off.

Microsoft has sent a clear signal of retreat in the meta-universe, which is completely bad news for the industry. Since the launch of HoloLens in 2015, Microsoft has been one of the important promoters of meta-universe and VR, AR, and MR technologies. However, the development of VR and AR in the consumer market has been slow in the past few years, and Microsoft has also shrunk its investment in related fields several times. Microsoft did not return to the center of the stage until the rise of the concept of meta-universe at the end of 2021.

But with the meta-universe not as expected at the end of 2022, and ChatGPT, a big change that can be called subverting the software industry, came into being. Obviously, Microsoft's strategic focus has been adjusted.

In October 2022, Microsoft established its Industrial Metasmology team (Industrial Metaverse Core) from its founding to its dissolution. According to Microsoft, the team mainly helps customers build an operating system that can control power, industrial robots and other integrated devices, allowing engineers to add artificial intelligence to industrial devices and processes without any software development experience, which is part of Microsoft's Azure cloud service. Microsoft calls it the "brain" of industrial intelligent systems.

The team was formerly known as Bonsai, an AI startup acquired by Microsoft in 2018, and was internally codenamed Project Bonsai at Microsoft.

In building the industrial meta-universe team, Bonsai's two founders, former CEO and co-founder Mark Hammond, and co-founder and former product director Ken Bronken Brown, became the head of Microsoft's industrial meta-universe team. But in this complete meta-cosmic retreat, two executives were also laid off by Microsoft.

The industrial meta-universe project can be said to be an important part of Microsoft's layout in meta-universe. Project Bonsai, the revamped project of Bonsai, was unveiled for the first time at the Build conference in 2020. At that time, the team already provided a free preview version on Azure, and planned to launch a commercial version. Microsoft pointed out at the time that the Bonsai project was only the first step in helping industrial customers build a vision of autonomous systems.

HoloLens industrial use promotion screen | Photo Source: at a meeting of Microsoft in September 2020, Microsoft Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Judson Altov said that Microsoft's industrial meta-universe service has partnered with Coca-Cola, Unilever, AB InBev, General Motors and Mexican food manufacturer Grupo Bimbo.

From 2020 to 2022, the team's progress was rarely reported until the Build 2022 developer conference in May 2022, when Microsoft introduced the industrial meta-universe-themed business. Microsoft mentioned that the Project Bonsai team serves a number of customers in areas such as automotive, food and finance, and that new customers such as Kawasaki heavy Union use Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality devices to make robots.

Until October 2022, when the Industrial Metasmology team was officially established, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella and other executives expressed support for the work of the Industrial Metasverse core team. However, four months later, the team was completely laid off.

02. Abandon ToC and turn to ToB and ToG in addition to industrial meta-universe, Microsoft has also adjusted other relevant departments of meta-universe, in which AltspaceVR has been completely shut down and HoloLens has also been affected by layoffs.

AltspaceVR, launched in 2015, is one of the earliest social VR software. AltspaceVR is mainly composed of user-generated space, called "world", where users can get together, chat, and hold virtual events such as business meetings and magic shows, similar to today's Meta Horizon Worlds.

Photo: the AltspaceVR startup experienced a cliff moment when AltspaceVR was on the verge of collapse due to financial problems in 2017, but Microsoft acquired it just in time. Integrate AltspaceVR into its hybrid reality ecosystem.

But now five years later, this old product has not escaped the fate of shutdown. Microsoft focused on the office scene and abandoned the C-side. Next, AltspaceVR will shift its focus to supporting Mesh, the AltspaceVR team wrote in its farewell blog. Microsoft launched Mesh in 2021 for companies that need remote collaboration and aims to apply social VR technologies to the workplace.

On the hardware side, although HoloLens has not been completely cut, it has not been in good shape in recent years, and this layoff has also suffered a lot. When Microsoft CEO Nadella first introduced HoloLens in 2015, he had high hopes for this augmented reality, saying it would be "the next big event." But the follow-up of this high-profile hardware product is not smooth, has been relying on the U. S. military order. It is reported that more than 70 HoloLens employees left the company in 2021, of which more than 40 moved to Meta.

During the Proternal Universe craze in 2022, several reports showed that the HoloLens team faced major technical, management and financial obstacles. In February 2022, a Business Insider report said that Microsoft had cancelled plans to release HoloLens 3. The report cited internal Microsoft sources, one of whom specifically pointed out that this could be the end of the road to HoloLens hardware.

At that time, Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw immediately clarified that the HoloLens project was dead, and further stressed that HoloLens was a key component of Microsoft's plans in emerging areas such as hybrid reality and metaspheres. But the statement did not explicitly counter the cancellation of HoloLens 3, which has been released for three years and has grown old in a fast-iterative market.

Kipman, the "father" of HoloLens and head of the project, said on Twitter at the time: "Don't believe the news you read on the network. Someone said that Hololens 2 had also been cancelled." But the leader of the AR glasses HoloLens team, one of the core executives of Microsoft's meta-universe strategy, left Microsoft four months later.

To make matters worse, the US military, HoloLens's most important customer, is also cutting back on orders. HoloLens is currently used in the Army's Integrated Vision Enhancement system (IVAS), which had previously secured a ten-year order of $21.8 billion.

But in U. S. Army tests, soldiers wearing Microsoft headsets often feel dizzy and nauseous. And in daily operations, these AR devices will also cause interference to soldiers. In April 2022, the Attorney General of the US Department of Defense pointed out in a report that the procurement of IVAS without maintaining the acceptance of soldiers could lead to a waste of taxpayers' 21.88 billion dollars in purchasing a system that soldiers did not want to use or was deliberately required to use.

In January 2023, Congress rejected the military's $400m purchase of another 6900 HoloLens-based requests, approving only about $40 million to improve the system.

After the departure of Kipman, HoloLens was downsized by the spread of layoffs, and the massive layoffs cast a shadow over the prospect of HoloLens. On February 2, Robin Seiler, Vice President and Chief operating Officer of Microsoft Windows + Devices, refuted the rumors: "although we do not comment on specific staffing details, what we can share is that HoloLens 2 and our commitment to mixed reality have not changed. "

Nadella released a layoff letter on January 18 | Photo: in addition to AltspaceVR and Hololens, Microsoft has also eliminated the entire team behind the MRTK framework. To put it simply, Microsoft's mixed reality Toolkit (MRTK) is a cross-platform toolkit for building hybrid reality experiences for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). The aim is to accelerate cross-platform mixed reality development in Unity.

On November 2, 2021, Microsoft unveiled Mesh at Ignite 2021. Source: Microsoft, but judging from the current information, it is too early to say that Microsoft has completely abandoned meta-universe. There is still room for HoloLens, and Microsoft continues to work with Meta in the office scene; after AltspaceVR was shut down, some teams also turned to support B-side mixed reality product Mesh.

So a more accurate interpretation of Microsoft's adjustment of meta-universe business is to cut the consumer meta-universe project and reduce the investment of B-terminal meta-universe project.

It is also understandable that at a time of macroeconomic weakness, Microsoft gives priority to projects that can benefit directly in the short term rather than those that require long-term investment. The to B and to G businesses are closer to money than the consumer side, and the latter is also Microsoft's strength.

But how long this contraction and retention will last is also unknown. Kipman, the key driver of HoloLens, has left, and the problems of backward products and poor experiences have led to the loss of customers, and reduced investment means that these problems may never be solved, leading to the beginning of a downward spiral.

When it comes to this point, it is only a matter of time before Microsoft abandons meta-universe.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: geek Park (ID:geekpark), by Zheng Yue.

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