Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Struggles

Mr. Zuckerberg’s zeal for the metaverse has been met with skepticism by some Meta employees. This year, he urged teams to hold meetings inside Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, which allows users to gather in virtual conference rooms. But many employees didn’t own V.R. headsets or hadn’t set them up yet, and had to scramble to buy and register devices before managers caught on, according to one person with knowledge of the events.

In a May poll of 1,000 Meta employees conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional social network, only 58 percent said they understood the company’s metaverse strategy. Employees have also grumbled about the high turnover and frequent shuffling of employees as Mr. Zuckerberg’s priorities change. Inside Meta, two employees said, some workers now jokingly refer to key metaverse projects as M.M.H., an acronym for “make Mark happy.”

In September, Vishal Shah, the vice president in charge of Meta’s metaverse division, wrote on an internal message board that he was disappointed in how few Meta employees were using Horizon Worlds, according to a post obtained by The Times.

In his post, which was first reported by The Verge, Mr. Shah said that managers would begin tracking workers’ use of Horizon Worlds, and said that testing their own technology was essential.

“Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time?” Mr. Shah asked. “The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

Mr. Shah, who declined to comment to The Times, also said in his post that Horizon would undergo a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “raise the overall craft and delight of our product.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/technology/meta-zuckerberg-metaverse.html