It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was fully immersed in the buzzword-a-thon that was the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame famously rebranded his entire company to Meta, to showcase the company's focus on building its very own internet. We'd meet, work, and play in Zuckerberg's very own virtual reality playground, powered by the firm's Quest headsets. Come 2023, and literally tens of thousands of layoffs later, it seems the company's "Meta" branding will serve as nothing more than a painful reminder.
Microsoft doesn't talk too much about the metaverse these days either. The bulk of its recent redundancies revolved around the troubled Mixed Reality department, which houses Windows Mixed Reality and HoloLens. Previously buoyed by a massive military contract, armed forces testers reportedly said that Microsoft's headsets would get people killed in the field, while reporting sickness and other irritations from its military-grade HoloLens HMD.
