Even the People Building Meta’s Augmented Reality Projects Do Not Find Them Compelling ⇥ theverge.com

Alex Heath, of the Verge, obtained internal memos written by Vishal Shah, Meta’s “VP, Metaverse”:¹

A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, Shah said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

If Meta’s employees are not compelled enough by this bet-the-company effort to use it even once per week, why should any of us treat it with a higher degree of seriousness?

Looking forward to Meta Connect next week. In addition to the usual streaming options, it will also be available in Horizon Worlds. If you are a Meta employee working on metaverse projects, you can use Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote to fill your once-per-week quota.