Meta is a pioneer company in developing the metaverse and its related hardware. However, The Verge reports that even the Meta employees are not interested in the company’s Metaverse app because it’s too buggy.
Metaverse is the latest buzzword in the technology industry, and many companies are considering it as the next big thing. But the problem is that no one knows the Metaverse’s purpose and how it will find its place in the customer’s life. These are some questions that even Meta employees whose company is building Metaverse can’t answer.
The Verge has obtained this information from an internal source within the company. Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, wrote a memo to employees on September 15, saying the team should stay in a “quality lockdown” to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”
As a side note, Meta defines the Horizon Worlds as “a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds.”
Meta is asking its employees to use the Metaverse app
According to Vishal Shah, the “feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted.”
Metaverse is Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of his company, and rebranding Facebook to Meta shows his commitment to this vision. However, the Metaverse concept isn’t yet mature enough, and even Meta employees are avoiding it. The pale quality of Horizon’s graphics is a great sign that the Metaverse still has a long way ahead to become an integral part of the user’s life.
It can be understood from the internal memos that Meta is upset with its own employees for not using the Metaverse app. Back on September 15, Shah complained that employees aren’t spending time in the Horizon, and their dogfooding dashboards prove this. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?” Shah wrote in an internal memo.
On September 30, Shah referred to a plan to “hold managers accountable” and make employees use Horizon at least once a week.
However, Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy told The Verge they still believe the Metaverse is the future of computing. She added that the company is “always making quality improvements and acting on the feedback from our community of creators. This is a multiyear journey, and we’re going to keep making what we build better.”
