As economic conditions tighten, Microsoft has paused its industrial metaverse project to focus on short-term revenue-generating ventures. As a result, all 100 of his employees working on the project were laid off.
people with knowledge One of the problems is that industrial metaverse projects are frustrated with the amount of investment required before they start to generate revenue. For a company that has already laid off more than 10,000 employees since the beginning of the year, this was not ideal. Microsoft is trying to cut costs and stay lean during these difficult economic times.
Before putting the project on hold, Microsoft was one of the major players in the industrial metaverse segment.
The dissolution of the Industrial Metaverse team has taken a toll on a group that formed just four months ago. The group was tasked with building interfaces for clients in the healthcare, retail financial services, and energy sectors looking to leverage Metaverse technology to improve productivity and efficiency.
Microsoft has assembled its team after successfully locking down several partnerships with top companies such as: Kawasaki RoboticsThe goal here was to explore robotics through digital twinning technology to improve productivity and efficiency. There, Kawasaki’s robotics engineer utilized his HoloLens from Microsoft to superimpose his 3D virtual model of the product onto the real structure.
Its cloud services arm, Azure, also partnered with Hadean, a Metaverse technology startup, with the goal of providing secure, cloud-based military training capabilities.
Microsoft still has plans for an industrial metaverse
Despite this move, Microsoft claims an industrial metaverse project is part of its future plans. In an email to Coindesk, the company said:
“We are focused on the areas of the industrial metaverse that matter most to our customers and there is no change in how we support them. We look forward to sharing additional information in the future.”
The metaverse is becoming very difficult to decipher as most companies struggle to figure out how best to enable this future digital universe. Unlike Microsoft, Meta is still moving forward despite suffering huge losses. They understand that trying to figure out the unknown comes at a price.
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