Following a report issued by Bloomberg on February 10, Microsoft confirmed that it will carry out a new wave of layoffs within the industrial metaverse team created in October 2022. This new workforce cut will affect workers of its products HoloLens, surface laptop and Xbox.
Although exact data is still unknown, it is estimated that it will touch the hundred employees of these departments, within the personnel reduction plan announced by Satya Nadella, the company’s chief executive, in early January. Even through a notification of Worker Adjustment and Retraining (WARN), it was learned that the company would have reported the dismissal of 617 employees in Redmond, Bellevue and Issaquash.
The economic slowdown, the technology crisis and the investment uncertainty that affects the whole world is not leaving Microsoft indifferent either. But this would be the other side of the coin raised by the company, since at the beginning of last week they announced the ChatGPT chatbot technology integration of Open AI in its edge browser and your Bing search engine.
In fact, it is already possible to test the chatbot on Bing by performing default searches like writing a poem or requesting a three-course lunch menu. In the case of Edge, it offers a beta version to check all its new chat and compose features included in the ‘Discover’ section located in the browser’s sidebar.
To the incorporation of ChatGPT to these two powerful tools would be added the deployment of all the OpenAI technology and its model Prometheus in the productivity apps such as Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, as well as in teams. In this way, artificial intelligence will be put at the service of these tools to make them more efficient, complete, improved and capable of transmitting a more satisfactory experience to the user. there is a long waiting list to be able to discover these improvements, which will undoubtedly contribute to the efficiency and productivity of its users.
Microsoft relies on the metaverse
It is contradictory that the company is so proud of its metaverse department at the same time that it announces a new wave of layoffs, although it argues that this is all due to the great recent efforts carried out to generate the mixed reality of your enterprise clients. However, they did not count on a decrease in the growth of their income in this field, which has led them to make this decision. And it is that in its last quarterly report, issued last month, Microsoft assured that demand for the cloud was decliningrepresenting your net income by 1% for its second quarter of fiscal year 2023.
the metaverse need to experience technological advances In different aspects such as graphics, augmented reality (AR) headsets and virtual reality (VR) glasses, something that has been detected as a market opportunity by big technology companies like Microsoft that wanted to follow in the footsteps of Facebook with Meta, as a result of the Zuckerberg’s company bet on the metaverse.
The reason why Microsoft creates its industrial metaverse unit is none other than to create software interfaces that allow you to operate control systems of electric power plants, industrial robotics and transport networks. Perhaps the company suspected of gaining more success and interaction with its products among companies than among final consumers themselves, since the latter have focused on virtual tests applied to retail and gaming. This view is shared by Gartner technology market analyst Anushree Verma.
your horizon
Microsoft continues to have all its hopes pinned on the metaverse, as despite the HoloLens and industrial metaverse layoffs, it had previously been announced the disconnecting from your AltspaceVR platform and focus all of your AR, VR, and metaverse efforts on the enterprise-bound consumer.
It has also recently incorporated the technology of its Mesh metaverse product into Teams, allowing better collaboration and interaction of users at their workstations by being able to combine different devices. Thus, microsoft mesh would support all of your AR product initiatives at the business and marketing level. Now, after the recently announced layoffs, Microsoft’s future looks uncertainalthough it will have to timidly continue betting on the metaverse if it wants to be a clear threat to its main competitors.
