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Tim Cook has a B2B Virtual Reality Vision

Tim Cook has a B2B Virtual Reality Vision

The guy is bullish on immersive workspaces, I guess

April 04, 2023

Good Morning!

We got a full slate for you today - market updates, VR taking off in the workplace, and Google wants to save money on staplers. Let’s dive in 🏊️

Today’s article is brought to you by: 100% human and 0% AI

Market Update

📊 Markets have stabilized and trended upwards as the fallout from the banking crisis looks to be contained mostly to the banking sector. The S&P 500 is up 3.3% since March 8th, as gains in tech giants like Microsoft and Apple are outweighing any losses from Financials.

🟢 Oil companies had a big day after OPEC announced they will be cutting production another 1 million barrels/day. Marathon Oil and ConocoPhillips rose 10% and 9.3%, respectively.

🔴 Tesla fell 6% as investors are wary of further price cuts coming from the EV leader. Article Below.

Banger Tweet of the Day

Chess.com really has it out for Harvard MBA’s 😆

Amazing
— Austen Allred (@Austen)
11:17 PM • Mar 31, 2023

Tim Cook is Bullish on VR

Not long after Apple severely impaired Meta’s advertising business, the company’s CEO is now becoming outwardly bullish on the future Virtual Reality.

In an interview with GQ, Tim Cook riffs on why someone might purchase a VR headset:

“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” Cook says. “It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it. And so it’s the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world—to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world. And so this is exciting. If it could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do things that you do all day long and you didn’t really think about doing them in a different way.”

Tim Cook

Based on his quote it seems the Apple CEO is approaching this as a B2B product, where employees will use VR headsets to fill in for what Zoom lacks - presence, energy, & collaboration.

Ben Thompson (leading tech strategy blogger) has voiced similar opinions - he wrote in late 2021 that VR will take off in the same way PC’s did, starting in the workplace before moving to the consumer:

I suspect that this is the path that virtual reality will take. Like PCs, the first major use case will be knowledge workers using devices bought for them by their employer, eager to increase collaboration in a remote work world, and as quality increases, offer a superior working environment. Some number of those employees will be interested in using virtual reality for non-work activities as well, increasing the market for non-work applications.

Ben Thompson

At the time (and still somewhat today), the conventional thinking was that VR would kick off in Gaming before making headway into mass consumer and businesses.

Apple is rumored to release its first version of a Mixed Reality headset this summer, it will be interesting to see if the product takes a consumer-first or business-first approach.

Business Bytes

🚗 Tesla Reports 422,875 Deliveries for Q1 2023 (CNBC)

While deliveries still came in at an impressive 36% YoY growth rate, the number was below Wall Street estimates of 432,000, despite multiple price cuts during the quarter.

🏢 Mcdonald’s Temporarily Closes US Offices Ahead of Layoffs (WSJ)

The company is expected to layoff hundreds of corporate employees virtually.
Closing offices to lay people off from home sounds like the Top-Notch leadership you’d expect from Mickey D’s.

🧴 L’Oreal Agrees to Buy Luxury Brand Aesop (WWD)

L’Oreal will shell out >$2.5 billion for the Australian personal care brand.

🐣 Post, A Publisher-Focused Twitter Alternative, Officially Launches to the Public (Techcrunch)

The social media company looks to move news outlets away from subscription-based paywalls toward a “micropayment” structure- where users pay a small sum to read an individual article.

Google is Cutting Back on … Staplers?

As part of their multi-year cost-saving program, Google announced they will be cutting back on employee services like laptops and STAPLERS.

They also mentioned they are moving to shared-desks at most locations.

This is the same company that is getting outmaneuvered by OpenAI. $10 staplers vs Trillion-Dollar Markets.

“Hey team, we’re getting our asses kicked by some startups and our search business is facing existential risk, where can we save a couple hundred bucks?”

Jokes aside, it’s more likely that this is part of a broader culture shift the company is trying to navigate, slowly moving from a culture of excess to one of austerity. It might be easier to instill said culture by starting with small things that nobody actually cares about, and then moving to the free lunches, massages, etc.