Snap Cuts Jobs, Changes Management for Hardware Unit (Sep 21, 2017)
Snap Inc has apparently cut about a dozen jobs and shuffled management in its hardware unit in recent weeks, according to Bloomberg. The only hardware this group has shipped so far are the Spectacles camera-glasses launched late last year, which had sold less than 150,000 units as of the end of June by my estimates, and accounted for less than 5% of revenue during that time. Hardware may still end up being an important future revenue stream for the company, but that future certainly isn’t here yet, even though there have been reports about drones and other hardware in the works. Eliminating marketing people from the group suggests either that Snap was unhappy with their work or that it won’t have new hardware to market anytime soon (or both), which reinforces the sense that a meaningful hardware revenue stream is still way off. To put the job cuts in context, though, 12 people represent a tiny fraction of Snap’s overall employee base, which sat at 2600 at the end of June and has likely risen significantly since then (it was under 2000 at the beginning of the year). I argued at the time of the launch that the vending-machine-based scarcity marketing for Spectacles was a very clever way to get far more attention than raw demand itself would warrant, but it never led to much more actual demand.
via Bloomberg
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