What the World’s 3rd Biggest Company is Doing to Create the Future of Work
And the intersection between Remote Work and VR
More and more people are working remotely — 12% of workers are fully remote, and 28% of workers are on some sort of hybrid model¹. In Manhattan, only 9% of employees work in person for all 5 days of the week. Remote work has been a norm for years now, despite company concerns about culture, productivity, engagement, etc.
However, there’s a larger future at play besides settling into some sort of hybrid routine; it’s virtual reality.
“For decades work was a physical destination; now it is a virtual one. […] Most of those people working from home were hunched over a laptop screen; ideally one was able to connect an external monitor, but even that is relatively limited in size and resolution. A future VR headset, though, could contain as many monitors as you could possibly want — or your entire field of view could be one massive monitor.” — Ben Thompson of Stratechery
In recent years, VR has played a bigger role in enhancing virtual meetings, with almost half a million people using the technology for work. Meta released their Quest 1 and Quest 2 (the Quest 3 is expected to debut this fall), Apple has its VisionPro headset, scheduled to debut early next year, and has plans to incorporate personas (avatars) into FaceTime, Zoom, Teams, and more. But no company bet bigger on this than Microsoft.
Microsoft was (and is) a leader in enterprise with Microsoft 365 (formerly named Office 365) that offers access to a variety of apps, including Word (1.2 billion users), Excel (750 million-1.1 billion), and Teams (300 million). With the latter, Slack, for contrast, has only 18 million users, and it is this difference in users that Thompson says experts fail to recognize — business communication platforms are ultimately, a means to an end. (ie. sharing documents, conducting meetings, providing feedback, etc. To be blunt, the end is getting work done). It is Teams that provides the capabilities for this, with seamless access to almost all apps part of Microsoft 365. Effectively, Teams has become the new Windows, in the sense that up to the late 1990s, Microsoft’s strategy was bundling Windows (software) with their various PCs (hardware) and browser, except now their bundle is focused on software or “the means to an end.”
This is evident by Microsoft making Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps (including Mesh, which allows immersive work meetings similar to those in Horizon Worlds) available on Meta’s Quest devices, as it continued the idea of being hardware or platform-agnostic. As VC and essayist Matthew Ball says, this strategy well positioned the company for the Metaverse, or more specifically what they coined, the “Industrial Metaverse.”
The constraints to make this possible are numerable, including the poor graphics, limited battery life, and in some cases, expensive to purchase. However, the very problems that companies have with remote work, might also be the impetus for VR to enter enterprise.
As Thompson notes, computers first became popular by enterprise purchasing them for their employees to increase productivity. From there, employees, if they liked the product, purchased a computer for themselves, leading to non-work applications and new use cases. A similar path can be seen with VR, with companies purchasing the headsets to rebuild culture, strengthen engagement, and of course, increase employee productivity.
This then addresses the constraints of VR, as VR no longer requires visually stunning graphics games, but basic functionality and its main selling point -immersive experiences- to attract enterprise audiences.
Note: Since 2023, the company has remained relatively silent about their Metaverse or VR ambitions, instead focusing on AI (via ChatGPT and Bing AI) similar to many tech companies. Previously, the company did see an intersection with AI and the Metaverse, with a machine learning platform that engaged with digital twins and autonomous systems. Additionally, Mark Zuckerberg believes that with the added input VR has due to movements, positioning, body language, etc. machine learning will be crucial to processing all of that, as well as potentially streamlining the process of building virtual worlds.
Whether Microsoft’s AI efforts will continue to apply in some way to the Metaverse remains unknown. Their ongoing acquisition of Activision Blizzard was supposed to serve as “building blocks for the Metaverse,” though whether Microsoft still believes that is also, unknown. Thus, any slowness in enterprise adoption of VR can be explained by Microsoft’s (and others’) halt in actions, as well as the way VR has underperformed to popular expectations.
¹From The New York Times
