Is it that the times are changing fast, or that Microsoft is changing its face fast?

On Friday local time, the media quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Microsoft has disbanded the Industrial Metaverse team formed four months ago, and all 100 employees in the team have been fired.

Last October, Microsoft took the lead in creating the "Industrial Metaverse Core" team, hoping to use the team to help customers use metaverse devices in industrial environments, including creating immersive new software interfaces and building industrial control systems behind power plants, industrial robots and transportation networks. The team focuses on how to use AI and digital technologies to enable people to interact with physical goods, assets, places, and equipment.

The team is mainly composed of a group internally called "Project Bonsai", which provides products for industrial customers involving technology from the startup Bonsai. Bonsai is a low-code AI platform that can accelerate the automated development of AI and is part of Microsoft's autonomous system suite. Based on Bonsai-related technologies, mechanical engineers can quickly build artificial intelligence solutions, which is one of the key components of Microsoft's industrial metaverse strategy.

Microsoft already has hundreds of customers in the industrial metaverse, including Mercedes-Benz and Coca-Cola. It is unclear how the layoffs will affect existing customers.

The layoffs are part of a massive layoff plan announced by Microsoft last month. On January 18, Microsoft officially announced that it would lay off 10,000 employees, or about 4.5% of its total workforce, by March 31. People familiar with the matter told the media that Microsoft's large-scale layoff plan will hit its smart mixed reality device Hololens department. The company has already run into trouble with its head-mounted device cooperation with the US Army, and Capitol Hill refused to allocate funds in 2023.

At that time, the Metaverse was a hot topic in the market, and Microsoft's launch of the Metaverse Development Team was actually a new attempt; but now, Microsoft is crazy about its new favorite ChatGPT. Earlier, Microsoft was negotiating with ChatGPT's developer OpenAI to invest $10 billion, and this week announced the launch of the search engine Bing and browser Edge equipped with AI technology, and the new version introduced ChatGPT's related technology.

In addition to disbanding the Metaverse team, on January 20, Microsoft's social virtual reality (VR) platform AltspaceVR announced that it would shut down on March 10 this year. Founded in 2015, AltspaceVR is one of the earliest social virtual reality platforms and was acquired by Microsoft in 2017.