Will Microsoft drop out of the metaverse? All you need to know

With the new year, the season of massive layoffs has continued from last year. Amidst the uncertainty several tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have fired many employees. With Facebook becoming Meta and expanding its Metaverse, various other companies as well tried to make big in the metaverse. Microsoft was one of them. Now, Microsoft seems to drop hints regarding dropping out plans to expand its metaverse.

Recently, Microsoft revealed in its blog post that the company is shutting its VR facility for good. AltspaceVR, the VR platform of Microsoft will cease to exist from March 12, 2023, as per the company. Moreover, a report by Windows Central suggests that Microsoft has also fired the team behind MTRK- Mixed Reality Tool Kit- theplatform which was opened for AR and VR integrations.

It seems that the company is no longer interested in the metaverse. In the blog post, Microsoft said, “We see the opportunity for VR expanding beyond consumer into business and now have an even greater goal: a more open, accessible and secure version of immersive experiences in the metaverse.”

Microsoft informed in the blog post that Microsoft Mesh is the division which will look after AR, VR and mixed reality. “With Mesh, we aspire to build a platform that offers the widest opportunity to all involved, including creators, partners and customers,” the technology giant.

Meanwhile, Microsoft might be planning to do more with less. Investors expect it to do a lot more.

The software giant is heading into its second fiscal quarter earnings report on Tuesday facing a slumping PC market, a slowing corporate software market and even unclear demand for its once-hot cloud computing services.

Microsoft’s dim forecast three months ago gave investors an early heads-up, and its plan to join other big techs in a recent layoff wave seemed to drive the point home further. “We will have to do more with less,” Chief Executive Satya Nadella told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, before the company announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs from its payroll.

That would appear to set a low bar for the coming report. Analysts estimate that Microsoft’s revenue for the December quarter grew only 2.7% year over year to $53.1 billion—the company’s lowest growth rate in nearly six years. Growth for the company’s crucial Azure public cloud service is expected to hit a record low 30.5% year over year—a deceleration of nearly 5 percentage points from the September quarter.