The company gives up on on the pivot to enterprise customers
Meta has stopped the development of its Portal smart display line following the decision to lay off 11,000 employees last week.
The news was shared by the company’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth as part of a town hall meeting for Meta workers previously working on the project, according to Reuters, who also elaborated on the decision to kill off future development, rather than pivot to targeting enterprise customers.
“It was just going to take so long, and take so much investment to get into the enterprise segment, it felt like the wrong way to invest your time and money,” he said.
The future of Portal devices has been uncertain since the summer, when reports first indicated the business would be moving away from regular consumers. Now, that plan appears to be dead in the water.
Given that Portal appeared to have only captured around 1% of the smart display market, according to data from The Information, it did appear to be a solid avenue for Meta to take.
This latest downturn, however, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has attributed to his own poor decision-making, the global economic downturn and increased competition in a blog post, appears to have been the final straw for its peripheral projects like Portal.
It isn’t yet clear when the existing devices – Portal Go, Portal TV, Portal 10 and Portal Plus – will all be officially phased out and unavailable to buy, and there’s also no indication of how long support will last for existing customers.
However, given that this is all relatively second-hand information following the mass layoffs, we’re expecting Meta to officially confirm its Portal plans over the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
