Reality is unpredictable. Microsoft's 10,000-person layoff plan has been officially launched, and the Hyperuniverse team bears the brunt.
Before 65438+ 10/8, Microsoft announced that it would lay off 1 10,000 employees before March 3 1, which was the largest layoff of the company in the past eight years, and the affected employees accounted for nearly 5% of all its employees.
According to the technology media TomsHardware, the team behind the social platform AltSpaceVR, the MR headset HoloLens and the mixed reality toolkit MRTK has all been dissolved.
The meta-universe business was once highly anticipated by Microsoft, but now it has become a chicken rib.
On the one hand, Microsoft is already carrying a heavy load. It is estimated that it will spend $654.38+0.2 billion in the second fiscal quarter, which will reduce its earnings per share by $ 0.6543.8+0.2. Microsoft expects that the company's revenue will only increase by 2% this fiscal year, which will be the lowest quarterly revenue growth rate since fiscal year 2065.438+07. On the other hand, no matter from the perspective of technology or income, its meta-universe business has been unable to break through.
Take the most famous HoloLens as an example. This device is more inclined to the B end and has not yet become a hot-selling product. Microsoft shelved its plan to launch a new version, and it has been difficult to meet the technical requirements of its biggest buyer, the US Army.
Before the team was dissolved, the project had been adjusted and reduced many times, and its chief architect Alex Kipman left his post in a dispute a few months ago.
Has Microsoft completely abandoned the metauniverse? No, Microsoft has not completely "evacuated". It abandoned toC's hypercosmic business in order to focus on toB's hypercosmic business.
AltSpaceVR is similar to HorizonWorlds of Meta, and it is a social space based on VR. On March 10, Microsoft decided to close the platform and focus on the MR mixed reality platform Mesh, which is positioned as a productivity tool, aiming at opening up virtual office scenes and suitable for enterprises rather than individual consumers.
In fact, Microsoft has mentioned the "industrial metauniverse" many times, and set up a special team on June 5438+ 10 last year, with the goal of creating a virtual world dedicated to industrial work, which can monitor and evaluate the real world machine and factory environment.
It is worth noting that Microsoft is actively embracing artificial intelligence while withdrawing from the battlefield of the meta-universe. Microsoft will add ChatGPT to its Azure cloud service after integrating OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence-AI chat robot ChatGPT into its own products such as Excel, PowerPoint and Bing. At the same time, Microsoft is considering acquiring more shares in OpenAI, and plans to spend another $654.38+0 billion on OpenAI.
WSJ, CNN, Financial Times, new york Times, etc. They are all interpreted as "gambling", while Microsoft is full of confidence.
Oren Ezioni, consultant and board member of A 12 Institute of Artificial Intelligence founded by Microsoft co-founder paul allen, said that generative artificial intelligence will become the core of productivity applications such as Microsoft Office.
Earlier this week, Satya Nadella said in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the company plans to integrate artificial intelligence tools into its existing products soon. "We need something that really changes the productivity curve so that we can achieve real economic growth."