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| Meta decides to terminate work on some of its products and projects |
META executives said at a general staff meeting on Friday that they would end production of their smart gate screen and stop work on the smartwatch project.
Not surprisingly, Meta took this step as reports 5 months ago indicated that the company was planning to end production of the consumer version of its Portal Smart Display and focus its efforts on the commercial sector.
According to a report by The Information on June 9, the company hopes to complete work on the augmented reality glasses project, which is expected to be launched in 2024.
Insiders confirmed to The Verge at the time that the shift in Meta's strategy was due to investor concerns about the billions of dollars the company was spending on projects that had yet to produce financial results, in this case, Metaverse.
Meta launched its first version of the portal screen, then called Facebook, in 2018 to encourage users to communicate more through the instant messaging app Messenger and compete with Google and Amazon, which have the largest market share. part of this market.
But the numbers suggest the company has screwed up, with the company selling about 800,000 smart screens, according to market research firm IDC, numbers that give Meta a market share of more than one percent.
On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a letter to employees at the company that 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of the workforce, would be cut, the first major layoffs in the company's 18-year history.
The layoffs have been reported to have a significant impact on other departments, such as B: the machine learning department, full layoffs, although Zuckerberg said in the post that the company hopes to focus on AI-based areas, such as B. Artificial intelligence based content. discovery engines.
Despite investor concerns, Zuckerberg remains focused on the Metaverse, which he also mentioned in his letter, despite the fact that investments in the Metaverse space have cost more than $9.4 billion through 2022, which the company is expected to lose over the course of the next year. . It will continue to rise.