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Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

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Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#151

Post by vikramkr »

_jal wrote: post #132
ahupp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the Segway, there's a remarkable number of self-balancing one wheel scooters on the street in SF these days (well, a few months ago). And I think you can trace all of those back to Segway. Sometimes v1 doesn't quite do it.

Those are toys. Back in the day, Kamen was going on about redesigning cities around them.

They're toys that a lot of people use as their primary methods of transport, along with other micro mobility solutions like electric scooters amd good old fashioned bikes. In a way, the future took the path of least resistance and redesigned micromobility around cities instead. And we might still end up redesigning cities around some of those options

The segways itself doesnt make much sense to me though. I dont remember too much about the hype when it was released, but like, I'm still unclear about what it was supposed to be able to do that an electrified scooter or bike couldn't.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#152

Post by Twirrim »

hinkley wrote: post #128
tootie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their tech is actually pretty decent. It's as good as anything else on the market. Their biggest mistake has been setting sky high expectations and just not coming close. If you got a cold demo of Magic Leap you'd probably be blown away. If you watch their simulated demo from however many years ago, then try on the headset you'll be sorely disappointed.

I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made promises that simply defied the laws of information theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the problem. I mean, technically, capital I Innovation often comes in finding a way to do something without violating the laws of physics, but that's how company origin stories are writte…

> I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made promises that simply defied the laws of information theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the problem.

Years ago, when "Web 2.0" was only just taking off as a buzz word ('07-'08?), Marketing came to my team to demand we make sure our shared web hosting platform be "Web 3.0", so that we were ahead of the curve. That was a super fun conversation, in a "hitting your head against a brick wall" way. You'd think that people in marketing would understand the concept of a buzz word.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#153

Post by Fricken »

_jal wrote: post #132
ahupp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the Segway, there's a remarkable number of self-balancing one wheel scooters on the street in SF these days (well, a few months ago). And I think you can trace all of those back to Segway. Sometimes v1 doesn't quite do it.

Those are toys. Back in the day, Kamen was going on about redesigning cities around them.

Urban planners are still all about micrcomobility

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#154

Post by ryandrake »

wpietri wrote: post #125
save_ferris wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo is a well-established company with a solid platform for its Switch that sells millions of units. They've been doing this for a little while longer tbf. I get the sense that "shifting focus" means that Magic Leap were so focused on the hardware that they didn't really think concretely about bringing a viable platform to market, or something like that. I just don't understand how a company raises that kind of…

But nothing about the crisis changes fundamentals negatively for at-home entertainment. Covid-19 is a convenient excuse here. > Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy? I'm sure they had a nominal strategy. But if you take the anthropologist-from-Mars perspective on Magic Leap, it looks like their real business was selling feelings of excitement to investors. This is a common ph…

Living off the money of "believer" investors seems to be a tried and true tech business strategy. Why sell hard tech to lots of customers when you can sell dreams to a handful of rich investors? One can argue that Silicon Valley is simply an enormous apparatus for transferring wealth from investors to landlords by way of tech employees.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#155

Post by jiofih »

wpietri wrote: post #131
catalogia wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The segway at least found a niche with cops and tourists.

Oh, sure! But those who didn't live through the hype may not know that it was expected to revolutionize transportation. "Venture capitalist John Doerr predicted it would reach $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history, and that it could be bigger than the Internet." [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technol...

I remember the hype being so strong that people were (seriously) theorizing some kind of gravity-defying device.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#156

Post by CerealFounder »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #120
leeoniya wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they ended up sort of shipping. i think that technology was CGI: https://hothardware.com/news/magic-leap-admits-outrageous-au...

That was the concept video which was different from the demo, but you are correct and they did a horrible job conveying that that was a concept and not the actual product.

Did they? They raised a billions of dollars to try to basically try to drag reality to this demo. It feels like a bigger version of a regular venture story.

"Gimme a ton of money to run this experiment. If I'm right you'll be rich"

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#158

Post by adam_fallon_ »

chrisseaton wrote: post #138
adam_fallon_ wrote: post #75

I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for." Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.

> Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it. It's not silly to try some promising technology that ultimately doesn't work out for business. It's easy to be nasty in hindsight, from the comfort of your home, isn't it? Not so easy to try making it work in the first place.

What a vacuous comment. Granted in the early days you could give the benefit of the doubt that sure Magic Leap are trying to build some revolutionary AR - you could construe my comment as ill-natured.

But go to Magic Leaps website now. Look at the promotional video that is being shown there. Now go and look at actual footage of the Magic Leap unit in action.

The company are being entirely misrepresentative of what their product actually is. They are using that amazing video footage to sell a product TODAY that is nothing close to the quality shown there. Look at what the unit is capable of and compare it to that.

Now sure, you can be given creative freedom to express the ideas of things that the Magic Leap lets you do. But then you remember the Whale video. They've been misrepresenting their product and trying to sell it using that misrepresentation for years at this point.

When TechCrunch first released video of the little floating robot game I remember people being astounded at how asinine it was. This is what VCs have been raving about and pouring money into?

So what are they trying to make work? Their promotional videos, ability to dupe VCs and probably their rock solid sales team - how long can should you give that benefit of the doubt for? They are 9 years old at this point!

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#159

Post by qppo »

duxup wrote: post #117
qppo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to doxx myself so I'm intentionally leaving out details, and you can take this comment as rumor and baseless. But based on the people I know (personally) who work there - there wasn't a lot of talent being thrown at the product. I think their organization is incapable of bringing a product to market, even if that market existed.

Maybe that was part of the issue. They had a large volume of guys like me, unremarkable folks... trying to do remarkable things. Not a good recipie talent wise.

To use startup lingo, they were a unicorn turning into a zombie because they never hired people who knew how to run their organizations as a cockroach. A lot of the people that I know who went there were basically fresh out of college or academia, because there was no one else in Florida and ML operated in stealth for way too long. That's not a bad thing (who among us hasn't been a fresh, doe eyed engineer at a startup?), but when you throw a couple billion dollars at them before they've learned how to build anything... might not work out.
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