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Magic Leap's $2.6 billion bait and switch – TechCrunch:
Two years ago I attended an "Innovation in Immersive Storytelling" event at Industrial Light & Magic, featuring the Chief Game Wizard of Magic Leap. I should have known then, from all the strained corporate sorcery in that sentence, that their demise was inevitable. But in fact I went into that talk a Magic Leap skeptic, and came out ... less so.
Magic Leap drew in a lot of true believers over the years; $2.6 billion worth. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Google (not Google Ventures — Google itself) and many many more. Sundar Pichai joined Magic Leap's board. And did they rave. I mean, it's a VC's job to rave about their portfolio companies, but this was different:
Now there is something new. Not just an order-of-magnitude more pixels or a faster frame rate, but – thanks to sensors and optics and mobile phone volumes and breakthroughs in computer vision – something I always dreamed of ... The product is amazing ... this is different
— Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins.
It was incredibly natural and almost jarring — you're in the room, and there's a dragon flying around, it's jaw-dropping and I couldn't get the smile off of my face
— Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull
Legendary and a16z had previously invested in Oculus Rift. Tull even told TechCrunch "Magic Leap takes a completely different approach." This is especially interesting because when Magic Leap finally — finally, after 5 years and $1.6 billion — released a product, Oculus's Palmer Luckey wrote a truly scathing teardown of the Magic Leap One. Again, yes he would do so ... but the details are quite striking ...
They call it the "Lightwear". This is the part that has gotten the most hype over the years, with endless talk of "Photonic Lightfield Chips", "Fiber Scanning Laser Displays", "projecting a digital light field into the user's eye", and the holy-grail promise of solving vergence-accommodation conflict, an issue that has plagued HMDs for decades ... TL;DR: The supposed "Photonic Lightfield Chips" are just waveguides paired with reflective sequential-color LCOS displays and LED illumination, the same technology everyone else has been using for years, including Microsoft in their last-gen HoloLens. The ML1 is a not a "lightfield projector" or display by any broadly accepted definition
What happened to that "completely different approach?"
See also:
Magic Leap press release: "Charting a New Course"
Magic Leap's consumer retreat is good news for the AR/XR industry
Instead Of Being Acquired For Billions, Magic Leap Lays Off Over 50% Of Workforce
What happens if Magic Leap shuts down?
Augmented Reality Startup Magic Leap Cuts Half of Staff Across Company (Report)
As Once-Hyped Magic Leap Flounders, [Ad] Agencies Say the AR Market Has Passed It By
Magic Leap Slashes Workforce, Causing 80–120 Animation Job Losses (EXCLUSIVE)
Augmented reality hits economic reality in the case of Magic Leap
Previously:
Magic Leap Bashed for Being Vaporware
Magic Leap Finally Announces a Product, But is It Still Vaporware?
Magic Leap Opens Up Orders for $2,295 "Creator Edition" Augmented Reality Headset
Magic Leap Accuses Chinese Company of Copying Trade Secrets
2020: The Year of AR? "$2.6 Billion Flop" Magic Leap Pivots to Enterprise
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 27 2020, @04:40PM (2 children)
This is what happens when ignorance rules. They can't and scarcely even try to tell that an idea is too ambitious, vague, or just total pie-in-the-sky, magical thinking bunk. The basic idea could in fact be sound, but they've greatly underestimated the difficulties. Think they will have a pleasant, easy stroll over to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or that at the least there's a way, and they'll work it out, somehow.
I have worked for a few startups that were, unfortunately, of this sort. I was too happy just to have a job to want to scrutinize their business plans too closely, and ask hard questions. They of course strongly discouraged such questioning. Try it anyway, and they would hit back with counter attacks, such as, are you questioning their competence? Tech Person, are you an expert in managing a company? Had training in business school? No? Not an extrovert either, huh? Then stop being a rude, arrogant know-it-all engineer, since you don't know what you're talking about, and zip it, if you want the job. At one of these, the boss had it in for the PhDs. Said he'd never been able to work with those people, and blamed it on them. I thought it seemed much more likely the problem was him, not all of them. He was forever playing stupid little mind games with the PhDs, to try to show them up, make himself look smarter than them.
There were a number of these sorts of bad signs, and I didn't heed them. Thought things could stay professional. Eventually, it becomes obvious to all that progress is not being made, and the money is running short. Things started nice and easy, and slowly got nastier and uglier. You may be blamed for not helping the plan succeed, and the fact that they wanted you to not bother your head about the plan, shut up, don't ask certain questions, and just follow orders is somehow forgotten. At one of the last meetings, the boss started it in a very accusatory, whiny way. Complained that we were failing him, weren't stepping up and doing enough, by which he meant, that despite having been kept mostly in the dark, we were supposed to figure out what the business really needed, and do that, in addition to the regular work we'd been assigned. Called us a "bunch of pussies". I thought about walking out right then and there, and in hindsight, I probably should have. It wasn't for his sake that I stayed on, it was for my friends among the employees and contractors. Of course reminding management that they didn't want the engineers' input is perfectly useless, unless you want more confirmation that they aren't going to deal fairly and own up to things. They weren't sober and fair to the investors, why, when the pinch comes, would they be that way towards mere employees or, even lower, contractors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @11:12AM (1 child)
You're not reading into the situation enough. They're telling you the money is flowing, they are getting paid, you are getting paid, everyone is happy. Of course, this is not to say, you and your boss are friends. He'll throw you under the bus as soon as it is convenient, nothing personal.
Your boss is still at an advantage over you since he gets to look into the big picture financial reports. That's one insider information you don't have to determine when to jump ship.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 28 2020, @11:51AM
True enough, and when the money was gone, they did pull the old trick of not informing everyone that they couldn't make payroll. Our last month of work was involuntarily unpaid. At the start of the month, they gambled that with a few new features implemented and running they could magically turn the corner, see a sudden and highly improbable growth in sales, and with that revenue, pay everyone on time. The programmers delivered the features that the boss demanded, even meeting his much accelerated schedule, and that still didn't lead to the hoped for sales boost.
Fact was, their product was not the great new breakthrough in work management and communication that they had envisioned it would be. It'd been hyped to the max, and not just by them, but also at trade shows. They wanted success so much that they got to believing all the hype, especially when it was echoed back at them. We were eating our own dogfood, give them that at least. As I had to use it, I could see a lot of problems with it. Chief among those was that it evaded hard questions. Well, Agile can't save a project either, if the idea to which the Agile-fu is being applied is no good. Mean old reality put an end to their dream. Afterwards, one of my thoughts was that trade shows are not to be trusted. At a trade show, talk is cheap.