When you hear that Meta has spent approximately $70 billion on developing the metaverse, you might idly think, as I did, that it sounds like a lot of money.
But as we see big numbers ever day, a billion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, itâs quite hard to grasp the scale of what we are talking about.
So letâs put it into perspective.
The development of the iPhone cost about $3.4 billion.
Total spending on self-driving vehicle tech is about $27 billion so far, excluding Tesla.
Developing the Hubble telescope and the James Webb cost less than $15 billion.
At $70 billion, the amount of money that Meta has put into the metaverse is, potentially the most a company has ever spent on an unproven technology.
So why is Meta betting so heavily on the metaverse?
Social media is a tricky business. Facebook has been wildly successful for many years, but more recently its previously unstoppable growth has stalled.
Partly the slower growth is down to the fact that, at almost 3 billion users, there just arenât that many people left online that arenât already on Facebook.
Partly it is the rise of Tiktok, which is seen as cooler by younger people. (Even writing that sentence makes me feel old.) Teenagers, unsurprisingly, donât really like being on the same social media platform as their parents.
Finally, Facebook has been hit by changes in Appleâs privacy rules, which now require users to give explicit consent for user-level monitoring. Funnily enough, lots of users donât want to be tracked, so Facebookâs ad revenue has taken a hit. With this context, itâs not surprising that Mark Zuckerburg has been searching for the next big thing, the thing that will keep Meta relevant and drive growth. And he landed on the metaverse.
âWe believe the metaverse will be the successor of the mobile internetâ. - Mark Zuckerberg, 2021
The metaverse is kind of a vague concept. The original idea was first described in Neal Stephensonâs 1992 novel Snow Crash. The book tells the story of a dystopian future of post-economic collapse where the US has fragmented and most power is held by private corporations. In this grim cyberpunk landscape an enormous parallel world exists online which you access through portable terminals and âgogglesâ where users can go to escape the crushing poverty and misery of their daily existence.
Is any of this starting to feel familiar?
Within the Snow Crash metaverse, you can adopt an avatar of any form and many people choose to remain continuously plugged into the metaverse by wearing portable terminals. The central character of the story lived in a shipping container, but is a big deal online. Itâs incredible that Neal was imagining such a metaverse in 1992.
So the idea of the metaverse is of a kind of infinite virtual reality playground where you can do wellâŚanything?
30 years after the publication of Snow Crash, Meta are doing their best to bring a virtual world to life. And spending such a vast amount of money, they ought to be able to do a lot.
What did they get for their billions? So far what has been released is prettyâŚ.underwhelming.
Thatâs a screenshot from Horizon Worlds, Metaâs virtual playground for creators. Itâs their flagship product, and so far nobody really wants to use it.
Meta has targeted 500,000 monthly active users by the end of 2022, but it currently has less than 200,000. Even Meta employees are not spending time there.
Recently Zuckerberg held an event where they introduced new avatars, this time with legs. Even this leggy leap forward failed to inspire much enthusiasm for what Meta is building.
And itâs not just Meta thatâs having problems with the metaverse. Decentraland, a virtual world valued at $1.2 billion, apparently only has 38 daily active users, a number the Decentraland Foundation later disputed.
Whatever the real number, its clear that metaverses have a way to go before the Snow Crash future arrives.
But itâs easy to make fun of Meta and their clunky virtual world, its harder to consider whether they might actually be onto something? Perhaps in 5 years a VR headset will be the primary way we access the internet, in the way that a desktop or laptop monitor is the current default.
You can even use it to bring multiple screens with you to the coffee shop.
But using VR headsets to create more screens feels to me like thinking the introduction of the car was basically just a faster horse. It just doesnât take into account what new possibilities will emerge from the technology.
Although Magic Leap was not the incredible game changer that people expected, I think the mixed reality future they imagined looked incredible.
Ok so this is augmented reality rather than virtual reality, but the point stands. And what happened to Magic Leap is instructive for what might happen to Meta.
In the end, they pivoted to focus on enterprise. Much like the Google Glass before them. Remember Google Glass?
Yes, itâs still around, but now it is an enterprise product for factory and warehouse workers.
The fate of these two fairly comparable products I think offers parallels for Meta. Whilst Meta is focussed at the moment on consumers, the enterprise side is also heating up.
They recently announced that they are working with Microsoft. Microsoft will bring its biggest service Teams, to Metaâs Quest VR device. With Teams now the default platform for millions of companies to run their organisation, this is a big deal.
So it might be that if Meta is too early in their consumer aspirations for the metaverse, that enterprise comes to the rescue.
You can look forward to some corporate âmetaverse trainingâ coming soon.
Look, this is a newsletter called Definite Optimism. The point of this newsletter is to talk about companies and technologies that are going to change the world for the better. I love new technology, but I find it hard to feel much enthusiasm for the metaverse. At least the way that Meta are imagining it.
I want to see a metaverse that can bring people together in new and exciting ways, not just copy existing ways of being in 3D. It could be an exciting way for people to have new experiences and live in worlds of wild imagination. I think Minecraft or Robolox are kind of early metaverses today.
They are places of enormous creativity, where people build entire worlds and express the limits of their imaginations. Itâs a creative endeavour, rather than just a passive consumption.
This imagination, this expression, this participation is the hopeful potential of a metaverse.
But for the moment Metaâs version seems like a distant echo of the Snow Crash dystopia.
Until next time,
Jamie
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