A combination of inflationary effects of money printing through the pandemic, Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine, and even China's COVID-Zero lockdown policies — are all contributing to a perfect economic storm hitting practically everyone.The focus on its experimental metaverse saw the company rebrand to Meta and imagine a future where users sought to wear bulky VR computers on their faces to do basic tasks rather than the palm-sized pocket computers they already owned.Integrated with the now-dead Kinect platform, Cortana offered voice command assistance on a connected TV utilizing the platform's IR blaster.The report describes how Amazon had once thought it could supplant mobile phones for driving commerce to its website, with users making purchases through its connected Echo speakers rather than the web.Amazon doesn't report unit sell-through for Echo speakers but considering you can barely navigate Amazon.com without stumbling into an ad for an Echo speaker, you can imagine how well these things have actually sold."