Magic Leap is pivoting to enterprise. Investment funds are in, and Rony is out.
But instead of pivoting to enterprise they should pivot to…porn?
I’m joking. Kind of.
Can Magic Leap Make a ‘Go’ of Enterprise?
I recently wrote that I think Magic Leap has a secret sauce: they’re positioned as a creative powerhouse:
“While the majority of ‘augmented reality for enterprise’ is focused on efficiency and productivity, Magic Leap is poised to help enterprise to transform markets and create new value.
Magic Leap has a different vision: that AR can be about something more. It can be, well, magical. And magic is what’s needed if you’re going to transform industries.”
Honestly, it mostly falls on deaf ears. Most people feel they’ve been burned.
Creativity at Magic Leap means creative marketing. Smoke and mirrors.
(John Gruber really has it in for Rony).
I guess time will tell.
Closed Systems
My point about porn? It sells. I mean, let’s face it: some of the early users of the Web didn’t come for the thoughtful discourse. They came for sex.
But I’d be hard-pressed to find much porn in AR. Or VR for that matter.
And it’s not that I think it NEEDS it. But it points out a problem: AR and VR are mostly highly closed systems.
Apple will have the biggest closed system of them all: AR glasses around which they’ll build a giant moat.
This will be AR your mother can love.
But where are the radical experiments? Which glasses will let us hack our own realities? There are a few ‘modular’ AR systems in the works and hopefully we’ll see companion open source libraries to let people host and distribute all of those weird edge cases that Apple would never approve.
Porn? Gambling? Anime-only AR?
You’ll know the industry is healthy when the news articles start coming saying that AR is rotting minds and ruining our youth.
I look forward to the day.