The scale of the Microsoft layoffs keeps revealing itself through social media posts.
This past week, Microsoft revealed its joining Amazon, Google, and others in laying off thousands of employees. The cuts reduces Microsoft's global workforce by 5%, which grew rapidly to take advantage of opportunities that were presented during the pandemic. With work-from-home culture ending, inflation spiraling, and Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine disrupting energy markets, Big Tech is scaling back to keep shareholders happy in a tough economic environment.
Microsoft is rearranging its bets for the future of the company as a result. Despite having acquired AltSpaceVR back in 2017, Microsoft culled the entire team behind the virtual reality workspace project this past week. As a result, AltSpaceVR will shutter for good in March, effectively ending Microsoft's "metaverse" efforts with it. Supposedly, Microsoft Mesh will be AltSpaceVR's successor, but it remains to be seen just how serious the company is about the so-called "metaverse," despite CEO Satya Nadella's buzzword-laden speeches on the topic at recent events.
In addition to the death of AltSpaceVR, Microsoft has also culled the entire team behind the popular MRTK framework. MRTK(opens in new tab) is Microsoft's "Mixed Reality Tool Kit," which is a cross-platform framework for spatial anchors in virtual reality spaces. MRTK was built for Unity VR integrations, and works with Meta's headsets with a focus on HoloLens.
All Comments