Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth released an internal memo to employees, stating 2025 is going to be “the most critical year” for the company’s XR efforts yet, Business Insider reports.

Titled “2025: The Year of Greatness”, the memo (seen below) largely takes an inspirational tone, urging Reality Labs employees to do “the best work of your career right now.”

Bosworth, who also leads the company’s Reality Labs XR division, offers hope and motivation for teams to succeed, stating the company needs to “drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR.”

Bosworth also puts emphasis on the success of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s cross-platform social XR platform, noting the mobile version of the app “absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”

Image courtesy Meta

While inspirational, the memo also offers an existential warning:

“This year likely determines whether this entire [XR] effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure,” Bosworth says.

“On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough,” he continues. “We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.”

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This follows news of a leadership shakeup at Reality Labs, announced by Bosworth last week in a leaked internal forum post obtained by Business Insider.

The post included info that Meta CTO Reality Labs COO Dan Reed is being replaced by Meta COO Javier Olivan, and that Reality Labs will work more closely with the company’s core business, as Bosworth stated the division has become “a positive driver for Meta’s overall brand.”

Late last month, Meta’s quarterly financial report revealed that Reality Lab saw its best ever Q4 revenue but, like in quarters past, it coincides with equally growing costs, which amounted to a record $1.08 billion in quarterly revenue, but also quarterly costs of $6.05 billion, making for quarterly loss of $4.97 billion.

Reality Labs is responsible not only for its Quest platform, its related services and research and development, but also Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which are built in collaboration with EssilorLuxottica.

Now in its second generation, the device has proven successful it’s prompted Meta to not only extend its partnership with the French-Italian eyewear conglomerate into 2030, but also reportedly produce a premium pair of the smart glasses with a built-in display, tapped to launch sometime this year.

Here’s Bosworth’s full memo:

2025: The Year of Greatness

Next year is going to be the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs. We have the best portfolio of products we’ve ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don’t feel the weight of history on you then you aren’t paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.

I’ve been re-reading “Insanely Great,” Steven Levy’s history of the Macintosh computer. If you haven’t read it the book chronicles the incredible efforts of individuals working in teams of 1-3 to build a device that more than any other marked the consumer era of personal computing. What I find most fascinating about it is the way that even people who left the program on bad terms (it was not particularly well managed) speak about the work they did there with an immense sense of pride. There was a widespread cultural expectation, set by none other than a young Steve Jobs, that the work needed to be “insanely great.”

On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough. We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.

Greatness is our opportunity. We live in an incredible time of technological achievement and have placed ourselves at the center of it with our investments. There is a very good chance most of us will never get a chance like this again.

Greatness is a choice. Many people have ben at the precipice of opportunity and failed to achieve. For the most part they failed to even challenge themselves.
You should be doing the best work of your career right now. You should be pushing yourself to grow where needed and doubling down on your strengths. When you look back on this time I want you to feel like you did everything in your power to make the most of it.

You don’t need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I’ve observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee. You should be so focused on results that being in a bunch of docs or meetings is too frustrating to bear.

The path is clear. You don’t need to come up with a bunch of new ideas to do this great work. Most people in the organization just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed. It is about operational excellence. It is about master craftsmanship. It is about filling our products with “Give A Damn”. This is about having pride in our work.

I will close with an Arnold Glasow quote: “Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.” 2025 is the year. Let’s be on fire.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • tomchall

    beatings will continue until quarterlies are good

  • Xron

    Wow, if they will go out of business that will be a huge ,.I., to all quest buyers…

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: Bosworth forgot that VR exists and that Meta itself is the very problem that prevents small teams from working efficiently; so his memo referring to a project famously harmful to the project members while ignoring the part that Meta's management plays in all this is at best cynical.

    Noteworthy: Bosworth memo mentions AI powered wearables and MR, but not VR, which is what most of Meta's XR users actually use. And when quoting Bosworth, Road to VR sort of shifted the meaning:

    Article:

    Bosworth also puts emphasis on the success of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s cross-platform social XR platform, noting the mobile version of the app “absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”

    Bosworths:

    And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.

    Road to VR makes it sound as if he talked about Horizon Worlds in general, incl. XR/VR, and only puts extra emphasis on the mobile version. But he really isn't talking about Horizon Worlds on Quest at all, he is only referring to the version accessible on iOS/Android as part of the Horizon app or on the web. This is basically Meta going after Fortnite as a virtual social space used on flat screens/smartphones.

    The rest is very typical motivation blabla. Managers love to point out the much higher efficiency of small teams, which is a fact and usually due to non-existing hierarchies, quick decision processes and effective communication. Three people in a room don't waste time with meetings or on Slack/Teams, they solve issues on demand.

    And of course he mentions one of the mythical development stories, the creation of the first Mac, as a shining example how to do it right. Jobs, ousted by Apple management, hijacked the Macintosh team that was working on a keyboard driven word processing system (similar to Canon Cat) and turned into a low budget version of the Lisa, the expensive proto-Mac that got him kicked in the first place. They were left alone because management was happy to be rid of him, the team had some incredible talented people, and Jobs charisma got them to really push the envelope. At high personal cost.

    There are other famous stories like Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" about a skunkworks project creating a 32bit mini computer that in the end saved the company's ass, similar to how the Mac ended up saving Apple. The team at Data General basically managed something impossible, but there is a very dark side. Similar to Jobs, the manager turned the team into a kind of cult with what can only be described as ruinous voluntary slavery, the project killed several marriages, and pretty much all team members quit the moment the project was done, all burned out to the ground.

    Whenever a manager of a large company pulls out one of these stories, you should be running. We know that large companies with big hierarchies, budget committees, quarterly shareholder reports and hundreds of people involved in everything simply cannot work as efficient as a small startup. And the problem is usually the company itself and the unavoidable bureaucracy, not the people working there. Which is one of the reasons why companies like Microsoft or Meta regularly buy up small startups, both for their products developed with very little money, time and people, and the people themselves, who aren't yet stuck in cooperate policies.

    Most people in the organization just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed. It is about operational excellence. It is about master craftsmanship. It is about filling our products with “Give A Damn”. This is about having pride in our work.

    IMHO that is an a*hole statement. It's the management's job to make sure that the people doing the actual work get the required resources and don't have to waste time with things that do not progress their actual projects. Not telling them that they just have to try harder and pointing to stories of massive self-abuse in special projects that cannot work in a large, complex organization, unless management first provides them the necessary freedom to try (and fail) on their own without interference.

    • guest

      The "mythical development stories" he should have read The Mythical Man Month (which should be required reading for anyone getting a degree in Computer Science). It was discovered very early on that adding more progammers to a project causes it to be delayed even further and creates more bugs. Seems he's only been learning this the last couple years from the school of hard knocks!

      • Sure af seems that way ….

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        The Mythical Man Month based on lots of empirical data doesn't make project managers look cool, because it shows that for numerous reasons trying to squeeze more performance out of people by adding pressure and working longer hours doesn't work for more than very short sprints. The idea that people work best well rested in a low stress environment with as little distractions as possible, so they can actually focus on a given tasks, may seem obvious. But it gets in the way of the fairy tale of the super manager that deserves all the glory for getting his team to self-sacrifice itself for the project.

        So people referencing Steve Jobs over and over again is inevitable, even/especially by those that don't posses any of the characteristics that allowed Jobs to push his people so far. And many methods/metrics TMMM 50 years ago had already shown to be ineffective are still around, simply because they are easily quantified. So they can be put on a report as a proof of progress, even if they completely ignore much more important aspects like the quality that was achieved.

        Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. – Bill Gates

  • Rudl Za Vedno

    Focusing on MR & Horizon Worlds? These Meta ppl are so out of touch what general public wants most… That is lightweight VR/AR hybrid with standalone & wired capabilites in combination with open XR environment. XR is too small to sustain closed gardens atm. I know Zuck sees MR/HW as a Facebook savior but it's just not. Either you open up the platform to outsiders like Valve did with Steam and prosper in the long run or sufficate behind your walls.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Wired capabilities

      No thank you, just keep improving wireless with better/optimized codecs.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      These Meta ppl are so out of touch what general public wants most…

      The current champion of Quest popularity: Gorilla Tag, a free virtual environment to hang out and play with friends with not particularly cutting edge graphics, populated mostly by rather young Quest users, and generating money from in-world micro-transations.

      What Meta now tries to push onto all Quest users: Horizon Worlds, a free virtual environment to hang out and play with friends with not particularly cutting edge graphics, populated mostly by rather young Quest users, and generating money from in-world micro-transations.

  • xyzs

    What ties people to a product, is the quality of the OS and the ecosystem.

    Horizon OS needs to be ultra polished, very optimized and as agnostic as possible (similar to how iOS felt compared to Android a few years ago).
    If Android XR and VisionOS feel more premium and more coherent ecosystems compared to Horizon OS, they will win in the long term.
    Meta really needs to understand that quantity is nice, but at some point, quality is what brings people together even stronger.

    A great hardware makes you buy one product, a great OS makes you buy multiple generations of a product.

  • blahblahblahblah

    Maybe they should finally take a look at pirating problems. At the moment it takes 10 seconds to hack an APK and remove the entitlement check, which is probably why there are almost 2,000 torrents available for download.

    • guest

      Those can be snuffed out. The bigger problem is developers being ripped-off by the sales Meta has!

      • blahblahblahblah

        Platform sales are optional, and developers typically need to register a few weeks in advance to participate. Over the years, numerous industry discussions have highlighted the benefits of sales events, even when factoring in discounts – lower prices often lead to increased volume. I won't bore you with the reasons behind this trend since there are plenty of articles and analyses available via your favorite search engine. Additionally, platform fees remain fixed, meaning the store takes its percentage regardless of whether a game is priced at a premium or heavily discounted.

        • guest

          Read the fine print, they can discount your product whenever they want. They don't care about developers that are not in-house (outhouse developers). If a developer of any value to them they will just take them over.

    • That isn't insignificant, you're right.

    • Octogod

      Meta wants piracy.

      I showed them how easy this was in 2021. They ignored it, because they grow the ecosystem.

      While not all pirates would become customers, we did the math and lost over $50k/week. Compound this across a few years, even factoring in that only 10% would be real buyers, and Meta's inaction cost us several million dollars.

  • Albert Hartman

    Meta has done the heavy VR lifting, and now all the major tech problems preventing adoption have largely been solved. Remember "screen door effect" and low FPS making you sick, or poor FOV? Even Unity/UE content & performance is great now, add in latest Nvidia GPUs. What's holding back Meta (and Apple for that matter) is their insistance on a walled garden for their own twisted business ambitions, not those of their customers. When the 3rd party open community finally catches up enough you'll see the VR space explode.

  • JanO

    As much as I'd like to see them succeed, this is just NOT the kind of leadership that would motivate those who can actually deliver the kind of fire & innovation he's hoping for…

    • Would it be out of the question to beg Carmack to come back and be CTO …?

      I know he's got the general AI bug right now.

      But literally everything he predicts about Meta & XR has come to pass.

      • JanO

        We can dream, but I feel he's not a good fit for big, corporate Meta… Valve maybe!!?

  • 石雨濛

    Meta cannot continue to lose $5 billion per quarter on selling garbage hardware. How did they lose $5 billon exactly? They did it by selling quest garbage hardware at under the cost of development and under the costs of its parts.

    The reason they sell at a loss is simple, they KNOW if they were to charge the actual cost of the device let alone at profit, NOBODY would buy it. Software sales are so low they cannot dream of making up for their loss.

    Meta was hoping that their headset would be as main stream as Nintendo Swithc but they are no where near the numbers required which is good because we do not want people thinking that Quest Garbage Hardware is VR. It is mobile garbage and is fake vr.

    • philingreat

      PSVR 2 is premium quality but is a huge failure as well, so that also dosen't seem to be the solution.

      • Herbert Werters

        PSVR2 could only be as successful as the Switch if it also had such games or software in its portfolio. But it doesn't.

      • 石雨濛

        PSVR2 isn't losing Sony 5 billion per quarter. All these meta fanbois complained endlessly about psvr2's price bc they were brainwashed by Meta to think every hardware company should sell their VR headsets at massive loss. That is the destruction of people's expectations created by meta.

    • Herbert Werters

      Quest could only be as successful as the Switch if it also had such games or software in its portfolio. But it doesn't.

  • Dragon Marble

    Whether we like it or not, it looks like Horizon Worlds will be Meta's focus in 2025. And if you combine Bos's email with Zuck's comments during the investor call, it looks like something big is going to drop this year.

    It's not necessarily a bad thing for developers. I think their recent sales drop had more to do with game-to-game competition rather than the competition from Horizon Worlds. If Mete gets more people into VR, it will eventually be good for VR game developers too.

    • My understanding is MH is due for a humongous upgrade this year.

      Will things like "VR Chat" around, will that alone be enough to save Quest …??

      Color me doubtful.

    • philingreat

      I think the main issue is that they don't get more people into VR, that most users who purchased a Quest 3/3S upgraded and are not new VR users. So almost no growth

      • Dragon Marble

        Then how did the Horizon phone app top the charts during the holidays? Old users don't need to download the app.

  • JB1968

    When I posted before that Meta's spending/loosing of billions and subsidizing the hardware == cripling the whole VR industry is unsustainable and in the end the shareholders/investors will have the last word against Zuckerbergs sweet dreams/lies, I was called as "Gaben's fanboy" or "Sony's peasant" by many "VR expert enthusiasts" here.
    And you can read now the end is maybe closer than anyone ecpected. But it is logical when you finally understand the absurdity of Meta's economic strategy.

    • Dragon Marble

      Meta isn't "loosing billions subsidizing the hardware". The losses are from AR research, not VR subsidy.

      You can't apply the economics of toothpaste to the moonshot. They require very different strategies.

      Far from "crippling the VR industry", Meta is sustaining it. Google is a follower, not a leader. If Meta is out, they will run in an instant. And we saw what happened to Sony and Apple when they tried to make a profit before there was even a market.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Their losses are from both AR and VR research, service, advertising, software development etc., just not from selling hardware at loss, because the HMDs are sold at cost. As this makes it pretty much impossible for others to sell hardware with a profit, which is the business model that got Android phones to more than 70% market share worldwide without requiring subsidies, the "crippling the whole VR industry" argument certainly has some merits. And no, losing money for a decade still isn't a requisite for generating profit, and apparently even Meta now begins to doubt this approach.

        • Dragon Marble

          Even Apple Vision Pro is losing money when you factor in R&D.

          So, in your imagined parallel universe, a Quest 3S costs $550, and the VR industry is prospering?

          Taking initial losses is no guarantee for ultimate success, but it IS a prerequisite for a transformative industry.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Of course AVP has to be a money sink so far with USD 10bn in development costs over a decade and selling less than 500K so far. But BOM estimates for the USD 3500 HMD are USD 1400-1800, putting the margin on top of production cost to 51%-56% of the retail price, way higher than the ~40% typical for iPhone. So Apple is preparing for their Vision line to generate money the same way their phones and Macs do, they just know that it will take a few hardware generations to bring the cost down far enough to sell enough units that this will also cover the development cost.

            In (one of) my imagined parallel VR universe(s), Meta never canceled the Rift 2, therefore former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe stayed on board after 2018 and we got PSVR2 like PCVR HMDs with eye tracking by 2019 instead of 2023, using RTX 20×0 cards that were the first to support the VRS required for foveated rendering. Instead of Meta pumping billions into still way underpowered mobile HMD hardware just to rid themselves of Apple and Google with privacy and content rules that cost Facebook billions in ad revenue and data hoarding opportunities.

            In this parallel universe others like HTC, Pimax, Sony, Pico and even long forgotten headsets like Razer's open source OSVR all competed for customers, which drove down prices for the much simpler/cheaper to build PCVR headsets and forced them to differentiate through features like higher resolution and FoV or wireless connections years ago, leading to much more interest in PCVR from both gamers and game developers. And therefore to a much more larger selection of higher end games, with many of them hybrid AAA games just like the early VR success stories RE7, Skyrim VR or Fallout VR that to this day cannot run on mobile SoC, instead of Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag as the VR games raking in most of the money.

            Is it sure that this would have happened? Of course not. But there are many possible scenarios that don't boil down to Meta spending the GDP of smaller Western countries in an insane race to beat the current mobile duopoly, seriously fucking up the market and still only gaining 10mn active users after a decade of trying. And many of these scenarios go along the lines of gradually expanding the existing technology and gaming market towards VR at the same gradual pace that industries like phones transformed in the past, integrating what exists instead of trying to force something new into existence with technology not even close to powerful enough, just to gain a competitive advantage.

          • Dragon Marble

            In the parallel universe where Meta stayed in PCVR, there would be no HTC, Sony or Pimax (because they can't compete) or Pico (because they don't have anything to follow or copy).

            There isn't enough room in this industry for more than one big players to occupy the same lane. Even in the mature phone industry, you have only two choices.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            In my parallel universe not driven by a Zuckerberg primarily driven by an obsession to beat Google and Apple in mobile platforms, not matter the cost, but instead by an interest in the medium, Meta of course doesn't waste billions on XR. Simply because there is no desperate need for them to be first and gather hundreds of millions of users before Google and Apple run them over with their billions of existing users. Which Meta of course failed to achieve in our universe anyway.

            In the "hey, let's give VR some time to develop as a medium on a properly powerful platform, before cutting it down to phone SoCs that will take years to get to similar performance levels" universe, it was perfectly fine to run Oculus as an actual business instead of a money cremation facility, selling hardware with at least a small profit, just like HTC, Sony or Pimax did for several years before Meta canceled the Rift 2.

            You just redefine any situation into one where Meta will throw so much money at XR that no free market with competition could develop anyway. But that is in no way given. If Google had reacted to Meta dropping PCVR and instead launching Go/Quest with "F*ck off my lawn, you tiny punk" and pushed Daydream regardless of cost to as many of their now ~3.9bn Android users as possible, Meta would have left the game long ago.

            They dropped other similar ventures before. For example they spent billions on a "free mobile internet access" program in developing countries that gave smartphone users access to a couple of helpful sites like Wikipedia that wouldn't count against their monthly data limits. Of course one of these free sites was Facebook, which caused India to pass a law that free services were not allowed to be limited to only some sites the provider chose unilaterally. The moment it became clear that Facebook couldn't "buy" their way to market dominance, they dropped the program they had officially started to create more equality.

            The moment Meta sees no more chance that Quest will help them against AndroidXR or visionOS, it dies, if it hasn't become self-sustainable by then. They only spend the money to later get it back . We aren't there yet and may never get there, but already see Meta shifting to AI driven smartglasses that were much better received by regular users. Bosworth's leaked memo makes it pretty clear that XR is in no way something that will lead Meta to success:

            This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.

            And there are many scenarios where Meta wouldn't have been interested in burning billions on VR in the first place or would have given up long ago because it obviously couldn't win anymore. That this hasn't happened yet is largely due to Google and Apple seeing that Meta's efforts didn't even get them to 1% of their own user base size, so there was no need to also light a huge amount of money on fire by pushing mobile XR while the tech wasn't ready yet.

            There is always more than one or two choices. You only act as if what we got so far was inevitable, which it most certainly wasn't.

          • Dragon Marble

            Somehow more friction, less investments, and higher price will lead to a better VR market? I am pretty sure your dream universe does not exist because it will still have to follow the same law of physics and math.

            You may be right that VR doesn't even have a right to exist on its own with today's technology. But I am not going to complain that someone is making it happen anyway.

  • xyzs

    They should release a headset that is so premium, that an AVP looks like basic tech in comparison, even if they barely sell it, that will be useful to show the world who rules the VR RnD, just like they did with AR. That's an important message.

    • Christian Schildwaechter
    • Dragon Marble

      How is that even possible? Put an RTX 5090 inside the headset? The AVP is not as impressive when you consider how heavy it is (including the battery).

      On the MR side, "the path is clear". You just need to wait for the chips to get smaller and more energy efficient generation after generation.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        AVP itself is 81g/13.5% heavier than Quest 3 one you remove the strap and light seal on both HMDs. But you are of course right that the 353g external battery pack required by a power consumption up to four times as high as on Quest 3 is the more relevant indicator how heavy a Meta HMD able to outperform AVP would have to be. The Quest 3 battery itself weighs 69g, so if you add the 353g (not really fair, as this includes the external case and maybe the cable) to a 365g Quest 3 lacking battery, light shield and strap, the combined weight of 718g is pretty close to the 722g Quest Pro. Add the 81g extra tech + 69g battery weight difference between AVP and Quest 3, and you get a theoretical 868g Meta HMD in the form factor of Quest Pro with the performance and battery capacity of AVP.

        This would of course require Meta to have access to Apple silicon and only be on par regarding performance, in no way making it look like basic tech in comparison. Adding an RTX 5090 at 2119g with 15x AVP's or 33x Quest 3's (while charging) power consumption no doubt would make those look rather slow, but also make it very uncomfortable and reduce the usage time to a few minutes. It will become feasible in about a decade, the distance at which high end mobile GPU performance so far has trailed high end desktop GPUs, slowly creeping closer.

  • Lux

    Watching them pump Horizon Worlds in every way imaginable at the expense of 3rd party developers who've put blood and sweat into making apps and games for their platform has been nothing short of insulting. Combine that with the almost total lack of "devrel" supports and it's a disheartening experience to be an XR developer for their platform, to say the least.

    You want to improve your platform? Stop trying to own every inch of it and showcase the apps people put their hearts into building for your headset. You can't buy your way to the creative inspiration that 3rd party devs will bring, which is why HW isn't a shadow of apps like VRChat, Gorilla Tag, etc. Innovations that'll drive adoption aren't going to come from within, and you already own the OS, why do you need to artificially inflate your mediocre metaverse as well?

    • VRDeveloper

      I feel the same, I gave up launching on Meta Quest and I'm going to PCVR

  • philingreat

    The sad thing is that AAA titles are not the successful titles, Gorilla Tag, I am Cat or NightClub Simulator VR are. Even Half Life Alyx didn't manage to save PCVR.

    • Herbert Werters

      Oh come on.

    • That,s a HUGE concern and challenge, yes.