Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans
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't have a killer app that could focus their efforts.<p>When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on <i></i>fidelity<i></i>, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods.<p>The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit <i>without</i> great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.<p>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't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.<p>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.<p>If you're a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: <a href="https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/" rel="nofollow">https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/</a>