Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

> 6,000 units

This number gets more mind-blowing the more you think about it.

It's small enough that one needs to start considering the units bought by management, employees, investors, suppliers, competitors, et cetera to say nothing of their friends and families.

Well, I don't have all the data points, but it seems to me that snakeoiler should stand out as an anti-pattern. Maybe VCs see it differently. Maybe they'd inform me that the snakeoil CEOs are sometimes frauds, but the non-snakeoil CEOs always fail (not enough energy, not charismatic enough to attract talent, etc).

("Huckster"... that's the word I was looking for)

And as if blatantly ripping off other people in the industry wasn't enough, then there was also the sexist company culture and blatant nepotism of Abovitz hiring his old high school buddy Eric Akerman as vice president of IT, who is but one of the many people they have to thank for the lawsuit about the hostile sexist work environment, and the fact that their leadership, design team, marketing material, and target demographic excluded and insulted women:

https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-settling-sex-discriminat...

>Magic Leap Settling Sex Discrimination Lawsuit with Former Employee (vrandfun.com)

>[...] It’s quite alarming to see Magic Leap make headlines for sex discrimination lawsuits rather than innovation and technology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310144

https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...

>This is an action for hostile environment sex discrimination and retaliation brought by Tannen Campbell ("Campbell" or "plaintiff"), former Head of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity and, later, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity, against her former employer, Magic Leap, Inc. (“Magic Leap” or “defendant”).

>"Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic comments have emanated from his department and from him."

>"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was 'because Melania is hot.'"

>Campbell, one of whose responsibilities was to help Magic Leap with the “pink/blue problem,” had to endure hostile environment sex discrimination while proposing ways, not only to make Magic Leap’s product more woman friendly, but also to make the workplace more diverse and inclusive. Campbell was terminated after (and because) she, like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who blurted out that the Emperor was naked, challenged Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct an gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars. Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do—admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were “aspirational,” and not Magic Leap’s version of “alternate facts.”

>Campbell met September 28, 2016 with Magic Leap CFO Henry and Head of Operations Tina Tuli for a conference call with the CFO and leadership team at R/GA, an award-winning international advertising agency that was Magic Leap’s advertising agency of record. During the call, Henry said of the product under development, “I’m sitting here between two beautiful ladies. They’re not going to want to put a big ugly device over their pretty faces. And I have an office with glass doors, I don’t want people to see me with these beautiful girls with ugly things on their faces.” Later, one of the male R/GA executives on the call asked Campbell if Henry frequently made sexist comments like he had made. A female executive at R/GA also was offended by Henry’s remarks.

>As an example of more egregious comments, Campbell told Abovitz of the “Three Os” incident and Vlietstra’s lack of any meaningful discipline in response. As an example of unconscious bias, she told him of an IT employee who was helping Campbell a new logo into the email system. Cognizant that she was taking up a lot of the employee’s time with minor changes to get the logo “perfect,” Campbell apologized for taking up so much of the employee’s time, to which he responded, “Oh, don’t worry, I get it. You’re a woman and you care that things look pretty. I’m a man. I just get the work done.”

>Euen Thompson, an IT Support Lead, on November 16, 2016, gave a tutorial to a group of seven new hires, including two women, how to use Magic Leap’s IT equipment and resources. One woman asked Thompson a question in front of the group and Thompson responded, “Yeah, women always have trouble with computers.” The women in the group, in apparent disbelief, asked Thompson to repeat what he said and Thompson replied, “In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries.”

> During Campbell’s last four months at Magic Leap, Abovitz—who always had been pouty and prone to temper-tantrums, began to dig his heels in even more in the face of dissenting ideas and to explode ever more frequently into child-like fits of rage, threatening retribution when he didn’t get his way, felt betrayed or was portrayed publically in an unfavorable light.

>[...] the “Wizards Wanted” section of its website. Indeed, given that a “wizard” generally is defined as “a man who has magical powers,” and virtually without exception images of wizards are male, Magic Leap’s recruiting verbiage contains a not-so-subtle “women-need-not-apply” message.

>Senior Engineer Eric Adams sent out an email December 4, 2015 through a company email list serv for social activities for Magic Leap employees and their families, which email bore the subject line, “Board (sic) Wives at home while you are loving it at the Leap,” which stated:

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Hello Leapers:

My wife is starting a Google group outside of the Magic Leap locked domain.

It is called “Magic Leap spouses” and should be findable as such.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/magic-leap-spouses

It is sort of a social meeting place for all the spouses that have been displaced, alone in the daytime and are new to the area, would like to have lunch with or just to have someone local to hang out with when their significant other is slaving away at work thru-out the 12-Hr day. Or are they just nagging you because you moved here?

Please forward this Email to your wife if she would like to get better acclimated to South Florida. The group is not public and is reasonably private (by email invite/accept) as to not accidentally disclose any Magic Leap secrets.

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>The gender-neutral reference to “spouses” notwithstanding, implicit in the subject line and the reference to “your wife” is the assumption — which is not too far from wrong — that all the employees were men with wives who didn’t work outside the home and were “alone in the daytime.”

>Sadly, because Magic Leap seldom hires and does not actively recruit female candidates, the company loses competitive advantage to products like Microsoft’s Hololens. Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster time line with more content that appeals to both genders.

Agreed. A reasonable model is that there's a really cool AR app that runs on a smartphone that you could imagine being cool^2 if it ran using a pair of stylish glasses instead.

But that doesn't really exist. There are some AR-ish apps like Google Translate that IMO fall into the better than nothing/sometimes useful category but there's certainly nothing in the "How did I live before this !?" camp.

Interesting article. Here's Abrash's wry summary of the problems facing AR:

Leave aside the issues associated with tracking objects in the real world in order to know how to virtually modify and interact with them. Leave aside, too, the issues associated with tracking, processing, and rendering fast enough so that virtual objects stay glued in place relative to the real world. Forget about the fact that you can’t light and shadow virtual objects correctly unless you know the location and orientation of every real light source and object that affects the scene, which can’t be fully derived from head-mounted sensors. Pay no attention to the challenges of having a wide enough AR field of view so that it doesn’t seem like you’re looking through a porthole, of having a wide enough brightness range so that virtual images look right both at the beach and in a coal mine, of antialiasing virtual edges into the real world, and of doing all of the above with a hardware package that’s stylish enough to wear in public, ergonomic enough to wear all the time, and capable of running all day without a recharge. No, ignore all that, because it’s at least possible to imagine how they’d be solved, however challenging the engineering might be.

Fix all that, and the problem remains: how do you draw black?