On the battlefield of the metaverse, Mickey Mouse and Clippy are the latest fallen warriors. Between mass industry job cuts and a trance-like shift toward generative AI, it’s a strange time for the tech world. And as often happens during widespread changes and reorganizations, some efforts get lost in translation — one of those efforts being, it seems, the huge rush toward the metaverse after Facebook-turned-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the entirety of Facebook around the concept. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, both Disney and Microsoft, two big-name companies that had skin in the game, have made big moves to wind down their metaverse operations, with Disney slashing its entire division and Microsoft shutting down a VR organization that it had acquired in 2017. “A lot of companies and businesses understandably feel like if they need to reduce headcount or spending overall, this kind of category would seem to be a pretty easy target,” Scott Kessler, a tech-sector analyst at research firm Third Bridge Group, told the WSJ. “All these things that are going on, related to AI, seem to be able to be used and leveraged now,” he continued. But when it comes to the metaverse, “no one,” Kessler told the WSJ, “knows when you’re going to reach critical mass.” In other words, AI looks like money now, while metaverse looks like “maybe money at some point, just not for a while.” And investors, apparently, don’t prefer the odds of the latter. It’s a telling industry…The Metaverse Is Completely Falling Apart