We all hear about the money pouring into Meta's Reality Labs, the VR/AR division. As much as 50% of Meta's AR / VR budget supposedly went into developing AR glasses. Meta has been working on the tech for almost eight years. According to one source of The Verge News, "Zuck's ego is intertwined with the glasses", and "he wants it to be an iPhone moment".
Poor iPhone! Its prominence in transforming the world is being challenged from all directions. Everyone is promising to deliver the "next big thing since iPhone" everywhere you look. And? Perhaps, I've missed something spectacular…, but the iPhone's the world redefining superpowers haven't been disrupted yet. And nope, it ain't going to happen for a while because the Big Tech is retrenching.
👉 The troubled economy caught up even with the seemingly unstoppable Goliath like Amazon, which has just cut 10,000 people, with the Alexa team being the most affected.
👉All Big Tech shares still failed to recover from the dramatic and consistent slide since late 2021.
👉Meta laid off 11,000 people, including some of the Reality Labs, the team that was going to make the Metaverse happen.
👉Snap laid off its Spectacles team. Another Metaverse-in-the-making casualty
👉Apple's glasses are still being rumoured… in perpetuity.
It might be a long, cold (Ukrainian?) winter before the recovery blossoms. We may need another pandemic-size shock to kick-start the system again. But even this, albeit overnight, changed our lives only temporarily. We are back in the offices, the kids are back to school, and it all feels more like 2019 than 2030.
So, now more than ever, it's time to Innovate! Perhaps, Metaverse is a horizon too far for some but
🌟Talk to your customers about their changing needs,
🌟Refresh your products,
🌟Digitize your operating models.
🌟Establish your innovation ecosystems.
...and book a 15mins free call with me if you would like guidance on where to start your digital product innovation journey. Let's build this "next big thing since the iPhone" together 😎
AnnieK