This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out in random video-game-like worlds, has died after being abandoned by the business world. He was three years old.
The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie “Tron” and the 2003 video game “Second Life,” was born in 2021 when the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his trillion dollar company For the meta. After its much-hyped debut, Metaverse became an obsession of the tech world and a quick hack to win over Wall Street investors. The hype didn’t save the Metaverse, however, and the lack of a coherent vision for the product ultimately led to its downfall. Once the tech industry turned to a new, more promising trend – generative AI – the fate of the metaverse was sealed.
The Metaverse now heads to the tech industry’s graveyard of failed ideas. But the metaverse’s short life and ignominious demise offer a clear indictment of the tech industry that spawned it.
A grand promise
From the moment of its delivery, Zuckerberg claimed that Metaverse would be the future of the Internet. This Flashy, fake promotional video The one that accompanied Zuckerberg’s name-change announcement describes a future where we can interact seamlessly in virtual worlds: users will “make eye contact” and “feel like you’re right in the room together.” Metaverse allowed people to engage in an “immersive” experience, he claimed.
These grand promises heaped sky-high expectations on the Metaverse. The media went wild over the nascent concept: The Verge published a nearly 5,000-word-long interview with Zuckerberg Soon after the announcement—in which the author called it “an expansive, immersive vision of the Internet.” The glowing outlines of the Metaverse seemed to set it on an admirable path, but the actual technology failed to live up to this promise during its short life. An impromptu virtual-reality interview with CBS host Gayle Kingwhere Low quality cartoon avatars Both King and Zuckerberg pointed awkwardly at each other, a stark contrast to the futuristic scenes shown. In the meta’s splashy introductory video.
Metaverse also suffers from a severe identity crisis. A functional business proposition needs a few things to thrive and grow: a clear use case, a target audience, and the willingness of customers to adopt the product. Zuckerberg Waxed poetic about the Metaverse As “a vision that spans many companies” and “the successor to the mobile internet”, it fails to articulate the fundamental business problems that Metaverse addresses. The concept of a virtual world where users interact with each other using digital avatars. An older one, going back to the late 1990s with multiplayer online role-player games like “Meridian 59,” “Ultimate Online,” and “EverQuest.” , one of Zuckerberg’s actual products — the VR platform Horizon Worlds, which required the use of an incredibly clunky Oculus headset — failed to suggest a road map or anything approaching a realistic vision. Despite the ideological development arrested by Metaverse, a pliant press published statements. Which was about the future of technology Somewhere between unrealistic and completely irresponsible. CNBC host Jim Cramer nodded in approval When Zuckerberg claimed That 1 billion people will use Metaverse and spend hundreds of dollars there, despite the Meta CEO’s inability to say what people will get in exchange for their cash or why they would want to strap a clunky headset to their face to attend a low-quality event. , Cartoon Concert.
High flying life
The inability to define the Metaverse in any meaningful way did not get in the way of his ascension to the top of the business world. In the months since Meta’s announcement, it seemed like every company had a Metaverse product on offer, even if it wasn’t clear what it was or why.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will say at the company’s 2021 Ignite conference that he couldn’t. “Exaggerate how much success” Metaverse was for his company, the industry and the world. Roblox, an online game platform that has existed since 2004, Metaverse rode the hype wave for an initial public offering and a $41 billion valuation. Of course, the cryptocurrency industry took the ball and ran with it: people behind Board App Yacht Club NFT Co. Joined Pres Believing that uploading one’s digital monkey pictures into VR would be the key to “mastering the metaverse.” Other crypto pumpers have also successfully convinced people that there is digital land in the metaverse Real estate will be the next frontier of investment. Even businesses that seemed to have little to do with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined Metaverse. Join Disney Metaverse.
Despite Zuckerberg’s passion for the Metaverse, the tech never lived up to the hype. Facebook
The rush of companies to get into the game has Wall Street investors, consultants and analysts trying to outdo each other’s estimates for Metaverse growth. Consulting firm Gartner has claimed that 25% will spend at least an hour A day in the metaverse by 2026. The Wall Street Journal said Metaverse will change the way we work forever. Global consulting firm McKinsey predicted that Metaverse could generate up to “$5 trillion” in value, adding that nearly 95% of business leaders expected Metaverse to “positively impact their industry” within five to 10 years. Not to be outdone, Citi put out a massive report that The Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity.
A brutal fall
Despite all this hype, the Metaverse did not lead a healthy life. Every business idea or rosy market projection was built on the vague promises of a single CEO. And while people were actually given the opportunity to try it out, no one actually used Metaverse.
Decentraland, the most well-funded, decentralized, crypto-based metaverse product (effectively an anonymous online world you can “walk in”), There were only 38 daily active users In its “$1.3 billion ecosystem.” Decentralized will dispute this number, Claiming that it has 8,000 daily active users – but it’s still only a A fraction of the number of people playing Big online games like “Fortnite”. Meta’s much-publicized efforts similarly struggled: by October 2022, Mashable reports that Horizon Worlds had less than 200,000 monthly active users – dramatically less than the 500,000 target the meta had set for the end of 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported Which was only 9% of the user-created world Visited by more than 50 playersAnd The Verge said it was so buggy that even The meta staff abandoned him. Despite the power of the then-trillion-dollar company, Meta couldn’t convince people to use the product on which it had staked its future.
Metaverse became seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. Microsoft Shutter Its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR In January 2023, laid Of the 100 members of its “Industrial Metaverse team“And made it A range of cuts To Its HoloLens team. Disney Shut down its Metaverse division In March, and Walmart followed suit by ending its Roblox-based Metaverse The project cost tens of billions of dollars in investment and breathless hype surrounding the half-baked concept, costing tens of thousands – if not thousands – of thousands. People lose their jobs.
But Metaverse officially stopped life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that started the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg announced in a March update that Meta “The single biggest investment is pushing AI forward and building it into every one of our products.” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, told CNBC in April that he is now spending most of his time on AI, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox. The company also has Stopped pitching Metaverse to advertisersHowever Spends more than $100 billion on research and development On its mission to become the “Metaverse First”. When Zuckerberg May Suggest developing games for Quest headsets There is a kind of investment, the writing on the wall: meta is done with metaverse.
Did anyone learn their lesson?
While the idea of virtual worlds or collective online experiences may live on in some form, the capital-M metaverse is dead. It was preceded in death by a long line of tech fads like Web3 and Google Glass. It has survived new fungal ideas like the aforementioned generative AI and self-driving cars. Despite this long lineage of disappointment, let’s be clear: the demise of the Metaverse should arguably be remembered as one of the most historic failures in tech history.
I don’t believe Mark Zuckerberg ever had any real interest in “the metaverse” because it doesn’t seem to define it beyond an avatar and a slightly tweaked Facebook with cumbersome hardware. Rather than a realistic vision for the future of human interaction, it was a means of inflated stock prices. And Zuckerberg used his vast wealth and power to get the entire tech industry and a good chunk of the American business world behind this half-baked idea.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has apparently walked away from the Metaverse is an indictment of everyone who followed him, and anyone who still thinks of him as a visionary tech leader. It should also cause some serious reflection in the venture-capital community, which has recklessly followed Zuckerberg by blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle founded on the most delicate language of a press-release. In a just world, Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as CEO of Meta (In the real world, This is actually impossible).
Zuckerberg led everyone astray, burned billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his whimsical obsessions, and then killed him when another idea caught Wall Street’s interest. There is no reason that man has Supervises the layoffs of thousands of people Should run a big company. There is no future for Meta with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm: it will stagnate, and then it will die and follow the Metaverse to the proverbial grave.
Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, the national tech and business public-relations agency. He is also the author of the Tech and Culture Newsletter Where is your add?.
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