Meta would have decided to stop all development around Portal and its smartwatches due to a drastic change in strategy.
According to information from Reuters, Meta has decided to stop all development of its smart displays and its smartwatch project. Company executives are said to have briefed employees – those still present following the spate of layoffs of 11,000 that occurred a few days ago – during a meeting that the Portal project had been halted. Meta has sold several Portal products to the general public, and the device has had good success during the pandemic, when people had to stay at home. However, in June, Menlo Park changed its strategy and decided to sell its products to businesses.
Meta would decide to stop all development around Portal and its smartwatches.
The Information at the time reported that Portal accounted for only 1% of the global market, even with sales growth in 2021. It was probably no longer worth chasing the consumer segment, and today the company decided that it was no longer worth developing it. product in general. CTO Andrew Bosworth reportedly told employees during the meeting, “It would just take too much time and too much investment to get into this business segment, it just wouldn’t be right to invest time and money.”
Meta has yet to release a smartwatch, but reports and other leaks have surfaced in recent years suggesting such a project is in the works. Today it turns out that we will never see it materialize unless Meta decides to rethink its schedule and some of its priorities. Andrew Bosworth also said the smartwatch team will now work on the company’s augmented reality glasses, with half of Meta’s investment in Reality Labs going to augmented reality projects.
Consequence of his extensive change of strategy
In addition to announcing Portal’s closure, executives also reported that 54% of employees laid off in recent days were in business positions, with the rest in tech. This affected all teams in the company, and even employees with high performance indicators were fired. Meta is merging its voice and video division with other specialized messaging teams and forming a new division that will attempt to solve the toughest engineering challenges.
The Reuters report did not say whether executives have announced a specific end date for the Portal models or whether the giant will continue to sell them. It’s also unclear when support for current devices will end. To be continued!