Meta is abandoning its Portal smart displays and smartwatches to focus on AR glasses.
Meta will halt all development on Portal and smartwatch project, according to Reuters. Company executives reportedly told employees — those left behind after mass layoffs that led to 11,000 people losing their jobs — in a meeting that the Portal. Meta sold Portal to consumers, and the device enjoyed a surge in sales during the height of the pandemic, when people were forced to stay and work from home. However, the company changed strategy in June and decided to sell Portal to businesses.
"It just would take so much time and it would take so much investment to put Portal in the business, I felt like it was the wrong way to invest your time and money," Bosworth.
See also: Australia: Fine for using smartwatch while driving?
Portal never represented a large portion of Meta's revenue and never captured a significant share of the global smart display market. At the time of writing, you can still buy a Portal device from Meta . A note at the top of the company's Portal website says that the Meta Portal TV will be available until the end of the year or while supplies last.
Meta has yet to release a smartwatch, though there have been reports and leaks over the years about the effort. Now, we may never see it happen unless Meta decides to revisit its development years from now. Bosworth said the smartwatch team will now work on augmented reality (AR) glasses , and that half of Meta's investment in Reality Labs is earmarked for its AR projects.
In addition to announcing the end of Portal, executives also revealed that 54% of the people laid off were in business roles, while the rest were in technology roles. Teams across the organization were affected, with even employees with high performance ratings being laid off. Meta is merging its voice and video calling team with other messaging teams ,executives also announced, and is forming a new division to solve difficult engineering problems.
Also read: Zuckerberg won't abandon the metaverse and Meta's stock plummets
In a memo announcing the layoffs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a combination of his own poor decisions, a macroeconomic downturn and increased competition led to revenue . He said the company would shift its resources to a “smaller number of high-priority growth areas,” which includes his vision for a virtual reality ecosystem called the metaverse.
Source: mashable.com
