'Pivot to software' has been done several times in computing history: Go Corporation, SGI, Sun, Blackberry, Palm, Sega, and oh, NeXT. These are interesting precedents. I don't know of a 'pivot to software' that actually worked (NeXT ended up going back to hardware, thanks to the reverse acquisition!)

There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because they don't have anything else? Quest OS is neither a best in class user experience (it's still full of bugs, frictions and is a very inconsistent UI), and it's clearly not a good dev experience at all.

So your hardware now inherit all of Meta's tech and UX debts, and you don't even have a guarantee of daily recurring usage or of a killer application user will flock to. Is that the great win for their hardware that they think it is?

Of course, as several of us predicted when the number of Vision Pro apps quickly surpassed Quest Store Apps, Meta is now forced to react and change their weird two-tier approach: they are opening a (small) marketing presence for App Lab apps and are creating a "brand new" spatial app framework, to start and get out of the Unity/Unreal game engine third-party pipeline trap.

That they only now see that giving developers a native app UI kit is a basic of any OS is… not promising from a supposedly now long term OS owner.