In that regard, Zuckerberg is making a massive bet that the metaverse will ultimately be the heir apparent to the mobile internet. In the metaverse, users can join virtual concerts, socialize with others, enjoy shopping for virtual goods, accumulate virtual art and attend company meetings, all using avatars.
Zuckerberg portrays the metaverse as an uncontaminated, vibrantly constructed virtual world that users can visit using wearable AR and VR hardware devices.
Without a doubt, Zuckerberg views the sharp pivot to the metaverse in a similar manner that Bill Gates did when he famously redirected Microsoft to embrace the Internet “tidal wave” in 1995. Sales like this represent a tangible growth trajectory and prove that the category is a significant one. Oculus Quest 2 (Meta’s latest VR headset iteration) hit record sales of 4.6 million units in 1Q 2021, almost triple the volumes during the same period in 2020. While not anywhere near the numbers that are routinely seen in the smartphone space, Oculus headset volumes have been growing. A quick review of Zuckerberg’s public presentations almost always includes the phrase “metaverse,” underscoring the significance of how the Facebook (now Meta) CEO views it. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization…So every budgeting process is, ‘I really want to hire,’ and that to me is the root of all the excess.Putting aside the emotion that discussing Facebook tends to conjure up, there is no question that Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality are hot technology areas and, more importantly, where the tech space is headed.
Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. Part of the problem was that many tech companies had simply over-hired in recent years, both because the pandemic increased demand for their products and services and because it was a period of easy money given Fed-induced low interest rates. Tech layoffs in 2023 are the highest they’ve been since the dotcom bubble burst 22 years ago, according to a report released earlier this month by recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Other big tech companies have also shed workers this year, among them Salesforce, Microsoft, and Amazon. While Meta employees have described “shattered” morale, Wall Street has responded positively, with Meta shares up about 112% year to date. In a blog post, Zuckerberg said he would “make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management,” part of a “year of efficiency.” Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced in March that it would lay off 10,000 employees-adding to the 11,000 job cuts it started last November-and would also freeze hiring on 5,000 more positions. It was something Musk “was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on,” he added. “Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of the same principles?…My sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes, but who may have been a little shy about doing them.” “His actions led me and I think a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, ‘Hey, are we kind of doing this as much as we should?’” he said. The way he sees it-and laid-off Twitter employees would surely beg to differ-Musk was right in trying to make the company “more technical” and decrease the distance between engineers and himself, with “fewer layers of management.” Zuckerberg delivered the comments on the Lex Fridman Podcast on Thursday. After assuming control, Musk laid off thousands of employees, reducing headcount from about 7,500 to less than 2,000 by February of this year, according to TechCrunch.
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