<story><title>Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/22/magic-leap-announces-layoffs-amid-covid-19-slowdown/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>npunt</author><text>Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn&amp;#x27;t have a killer app that could focus their efforts.&lt;p&gt;When you&amp;#x27;re building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;fidelity&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods.&lt;p&gt;The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit &lt;i&gt;without&lt;/i&gt; great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That&amp;#x27;s where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.&lt;p&gt;A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn&amp;#x27;t chase the &amp;#x27;smartphone on your wrist&amp;#x27; everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.&lt;p&gt;When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nickpunt.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;category-defining-products&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nickpunt.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;category-defining-products&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>egd</author><text>The basic problem is that without high fidelity &amp;amp; a wide FOV, there&amp;#x27;s nothing that sets MagicLeap apart from any of the other companies that have been able to create AR headsets for the last ~decade.&lt;p&gt;AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren&amp;#x27;t up to the task. The &amp;quot;Waveguide&amp;quot; approach has always fallen short - nobody&amp;#x27;s ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the &amp;quot;passthrough&amp;quot; approach isn&amp;#x27;t really viable for walking down the street.&lt;p&gt;This is why I&amp;#x27;m skeptical about Apple&amp;#x27;s AR moves - unless they&amp;#x27;ve either got a totally new display technology or they&amp;#x27;ve managed to do something incredibly clever with the waveguide approach, I just don&amp;#x27;t see consumer goggles working.&lt;p&gt;The only people I&amp;#x27;ve seen doing something unique in this space is Tilt Five: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tiltfive.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tiltfive.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; - they&amp;#x27;ve basically done what you&amp;#x27;re suggesting: constrain the use case until you can actually build something for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/22/magic-leap-announces-layoffs-amid-covid-19-slowdown/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>npunt</author><text>Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn&amp;#x27;t have a killer app that could focus their efforts.&lt;p&gt;When you&amp;#x27;re building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;fidelity&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods.&lt;p&gt;The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit &lt;i&gt;without&lt;/i&gt; great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That&amp;#x27;s where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.&lt;p&gt;A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn&amp;#x27;t chase the &amp;#x27;smartphone on your wrist&amp;#x27; everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.&lt;p&gt;When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nickpunt.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;category-defining-products&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nickpunt.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;category-defining-products&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>didibus</author><text>I agree with you, but I also want to say it&amp;#x27;s often more complicated then this.&lt;p&gt;Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that?&lt;p&gt;This is an open question, I don&amp;#x27;t claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as opposed to FitBit, that it would bring much more use cases to the user, a smartwatch on your wrist really, that seems like it was the messaging at least.</text></comment>