Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

Re:Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from co... by zaidf on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @11:25PM (#22952545)

...because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts

This is easy to assume but a far more common reason companies go broad is that it makes it much easier to sell big vision and big dreams.

Most investors in magicleap probably wouldn’t have invested if the pitch was “right now we are focused 100% on a product that serves $INDUSTRY_X well before moving to $INDUSTRY_Y”

In fact, many investors wouldn’t even have taken the pitch, let alone writing a check

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Re:Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from co... by wastedhours on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:03AM (#22953771)

Completely agree - but for such a well funded company, surely they could have continued to try and sell unicorn tears on the front end, but spent some real time and effort to nail something on the backend.

This "pivot" seems like a play they should have been running in parallel regardless, considering they've had actual hardware on the go for a few years so far.

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Re:Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from co... by npunt on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:33AM (#22953907)

Sure, selling a big vision is important to new startups. That's just one of many constraints and risks you have, but like all risks it can be navigated well or poorly. They could sell a big vision but also have a plan to increment there, but they didn't. I don't think that negates the fact that Magic Leap never presented what their groundbreaking idea was for why we needed AR.

If you're interested I do cover this among other things in the linked essay.

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