Meta’s flagship metaverse app is too buggy and employees are barely using it

[Free]

Good signs all around for the re-coming of the metaverse.

Meta’s VR social network Horizon is too buggy and employees are barely using it

‘We are working on a product that has not found product market fit,” says an exec in a leaked memo.

www.theverge.com

In one of the memos to employees dated September 15th, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”

Horizon Worlds lets people build and interact in virtual worlds as legless avatars, sort of like Roblox meets Minecraft. It’s a key initiative following CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranding of Facebook to Meta; the company is spending billions per year to build his vision of the metaverse. The multiplayer platform was released on Meta’s Quest headset in December of last year. It hit 300,000 users earlier this year and is supposed to be coming to mobile and desktop via a web version sometime soon, though Vishal’s memos imply a web launch could be pushed back.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Reminds me of my visit to a Microsoft campus back when they were coming up with a new challenger for the Palm Pilot, in about 2000, when basically every professional had a Palm. Microsoft was all about "eating their own dogfood" so they gave basically every employee a free device, running Windows CE. One of their features was they were compatible with Palm's method of "beaming" contacts though a little IR sender. Every Microsoft developer I spoke to, I asked if I could exchange contacts with them on their Microsoft handheld. Every one of them said they couldn't because it was back in their desk drawer.

This included people on the Windows CE dev team.