Just about one year after we saw Facebook rename itself to Meta and betting big on the Metaverse, Meta had more to share. Last week saw the big Meta connect keynote and update from Mark Zuckerberg on the state of the Metaverse. What did we learn? – we learned that Meta still believes that this is the future and continues to bet big on it – so far Meta sunk more than $15 Billion into this idea. Ok, they have sufficient funds (but for how long?) and can continue to push it. But will it land before they run out of money? I have high hopes for everyone that bets currently against Meta on the stock exchange. I don’t think their share price will ever reach again the highs of Facebook (lost more than 62% in the last 12 months and 5% post the Meta connect announcements). I continue to believe that Mark is trying to define and create a new world that no one has asked for. I am impressed by his focus and dedication – and at the same time puzzled how he can overlook all the signs that this is a dead-end or at best a new market that is much smaller (or very different) than what he imagines.
The Metaverse fails already
There are many clear signs for that. Two that I find especially funny are the legs-meme and that not even Meta employees utilize their Metaverse (Horizon Worlds) or know what to do with it. When Meta introduced his Metaverse, all the Avatars were missing legs and the whole net made fun of that. Finally last week Mark’s Avatar got legs and could jump – awesome! I mean, of course it is more realistic (if you can even talk about this with this rudimentary graphics design) to have legs, but it is nothing to celebrate or put out one word tweets “Legs”. If this is an achievement that Meta is proud of, good luck. And then there are indications that its own Meta staff doesn’t utilize the Metaverse as it is too complex, buggy, not helpful in getting work done. And we should not forget that Meta planned to have over 500k regular users by end of 2022 and instead now has even less users than in Q1 of this year (looks like around 200k users).
What is still missing is THE KILLER-App that makes the Metaverse useful, as well as of course a big enough crowd to have social interaction with, a reason to join and come back regularly. What is also still missing is a clear focus – for whom is it actually? Why? Is it focused on consumers that should “live” in it rather than in the real world aka “Ready Player One”? Or is it focused on companies and collaboration at work? – I am not clear. And the announcement of the new Headset or Face-Computer like many journalists call it (read here) did not make it clear either. Of course it is an impressive piece of hardware, but for the price of $1.500 who can afford it? and for what? This is cost prohibitive for the regular consumer and also prohibits a wider adoption in the enterprise market.
But then there was the announcement of Meta and Microsoft? How does this fit in? I believe that there are multiple ways you could look at this. On one hand, it could be a strong statement that THE number one enterprise-software company is now bought in and supports the Metaverse in and with its core Microsoft365 (formerly known as Office) applications; on the other hand you could say that Microsoft gave up their own metaverse efforts (Hololens) as this market did not play out how they hoped and they focus their own efforts now again on what matters (read: and let Meta play with the Metaverse and just be there…). Regardless how you read it, I think we can agree that Excel in VR is not a Killer App.
The concept though has potential
But don’t get me wrong – I still believe in a few core concepts and ideas around the metaverse, just not Meta’s version of it. I think we can all agree the metaverses in the gaming industry are already today very successful and bring high revenues and profits. These have a clear focus and purpose: They are to play a game, to meet like-minded people from across the world and you don’t need a heavy, expensive headset to make it work. But the more encompassing ones like 2nd Life are small and not really profit-generating. Then there are different ways to look at the metaverse and different interpretations of it, like the one from Scott Galloway.
The other core-concepts I believe in are AR and VR. Both are very promising technologies which will have a big future. AR already via your smartphone is amazing and will be much stronger in the future and potentially bring up a huge new market at the intersection of online (AR) and reality. We might not like everything around it, but I see a big future for that in the commercial space – targeted, real world marketing with AR advertisements, shared experiences, immersive tourism and many more use-cases.
And VR, too. VR can be a game changer in realistic enterprise learning efforts where it is important to not only read/ absorb but feel or try out/ do something specific to reach the full learning experience. We are also already there, not yet widely adopted, but the use cases are there and with reduced costs it will be even wider adopted.
But both VR and AR and their use-cases are outside Mark’s Metaverse and will continue to be successful without it. I am sure about that.
Chief HR Officer 