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This article originally appeared on business insider.
The Metaverse, once a buzzy technology that promised to let users hang out awkwardly in a disorienting video game-like world, died after being abandoned by the business world. I was 3 years old.
A descendant of the 1982 film Tron and the 2003 video game Second Life, the Capital M Metaverse is born in 2021 by the founder of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg renamed his trillion dollar company to meta. After its big announcement, the Metaverse became a tech industry fanatic and a quick hack that lured Wall Street investors. But the hype couldn’t save the metaverse, and a lack of a coherent vision for the product ultimately led to its decline.As the tech industry turns to a new and more promising trend, generative AI, The fate of the Metaverse is decided.
The Metaverse is currently heading towards the tech industry’s graveyard of failed ideas. However, the Metaverse’s short life and ignominious death berate the tech industry that created it.
grand promise
From the moment of delivery, Zuckerberg has claimed that the Metaverse will be the future of the internet.of Flashy and pretentious promo video Accompanying Zuckerberg’s name change announcement described a future where we could seamlessly interact in virtual worlds. Users “make eye contact” and “feel like they’re in the room together.” The Metaverse offered people the opportunity to participate in an “immersive” experience, he argued.
These grand promises had very high expectations for the Metaverse. The media has swooned over the concept of a newborn. The Verge published a nearly 5,000-word interview with Zuckerberg. Shortly after the announcement — the writer called it “a vast, immersive vision of the Internet.” During its short lifespan, it failed to deliver on this promise. An unsettling virtual reality interview with CBS host Gayle Kingwhere low quality cartoon avatar Both King and Zuckerberg awkwardly gesticulating at each other were a stark contrast to the futuristic landscape shown. In Meta’s flashy introductory video.
The Metaverse also suffered from a severe identity crisis. Several ingredients are required for a functional business proposition to succeed and grow. Specifically, a clear use case, target audience, and customer willingness to adopt your product.zuckerberg Poetic wax about the metaverse As a “spanning vision” and “successor to the mobile Internet”, he failed to articulate the fundamental business problem the Metaverse addresses. The concept of virtual worlds, where users interact with each other using digital avatars, dates back to the late 1990s with the emergence of massively multiplayer online role-player games such as Meridian 59, Ultimate Online, and EverQuest. Although an old game, Metaverse is believed to have built on these ideas with new technology. , Zuckerberg’s one actual product — the VR platform Horizon Worlds had to use an incredibly clunky Oculus headset — suggests a roadmap or nothing closer to a true vision. I couldn’t do it.About the future of technology somewhere between impractical and utterly irresponsibleCNBC host Jim Cramer nodded approvingly. When Zuckerberg claimed With a billion people going to the Metaverse and spending hundreds of dollars there, Meta’s CEO warns people about what they’ll receive in exchange for cash, or wearing clunky headsets on their faces to attend low-quality events. Although I can’t say why I want to tie up, , a cartoon concert.
high-handed life
The inability to define the metaverse in a meaningful way has not been a deterrent to its rise to the top of the business world. Months after Meta’s announcement, it seemed like every company was offering his Metaverse product.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the company’s 2021 Ignite Conference, “Exaggerate how many breakthroughs“The Metaverse was for his company, his industry, and the world. Roblox, an online gaming platform that has been around since 2004, Ride the Metaverse Hype Wave to an initial public offering and a valuation of $41 billion. Of course, the cryptocurrency industry got the ball and did it. Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT deceived the press It tricked me into believing that uploading a photo of someone’s digital monkey into VR was the key to “mastering the metaverse.”Other cryptopumps have even managed to convince people that the Digital Land is in the Metaverse The next frontier for real estate investmentEven companies that seemed to have little to do with technology have joined. Walmart joins metaverse. Joining Disney metaverse.
Despite Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse, the tech never lived up to the hype.Facebook
The influx of companies trying to get into the game has prompted Wall Street investors, consultants, and analysts to up a notch on each other’s projections for the growth of the Metaverse. Consulting firm Gartner claims: 25% of people spend at least an hour One day in the metaverse by 2026. According to The Wall Street Journal, The Metaverse will change the way we work foreverGlobal consulting firm McKinsey predicts that the Metaverse could create up to “$5 trillion in value,” and nearly 95% of business leaders believe the Metaverse will have a “positive impact on the industry” within five to 10 years. ,” he added. Not to be outdone, Citi released a massive report that includes: The Metaverse Declared a $13 Trillion Opportunity.
brutal fall
Despite all the hype, the Metaverse couldn’t live a healthy life. All her business ideas and optimistic market forecasts are built on one CEO’s vague promises. No one had actually used the metaverse when they were offered the chance to try it out.
Decentraland, the most well-funded, decentralized crypto-based metaverse product (effectively a volatile online world that you can “walk around”), Only about 38 daily active users In that “$1.3 billion ecosystem.” Decentraland disputes this number. Claims to have 8,000 daily active users — but that’s still just the beginning Percentage of people playing Massive online games such as “Fortnite”. The much-hyped Meta effort struggled as well: By October 2022, Reported Mashable Horizon Worlds has less than 200,000 monthly active users, well below Meta’s goal of 500,000 by the end of 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported Only about 9% of user-created worlds Over 50 players visitedand The Verge said it was very buggy. Meta employees avoided itDespite being a multi-trillion dollar company at the time, Meta couldn’t convince people to use the product it was betting the future on.
The metaverse has fallen seriously ill as the economy slows and the hype about generative AI grows.Microsoft has closed Its virtual workspace platform AltSpaceVR Laying January 2023 From the 100 members of its “Industrial Metaverse Team”,” series of cuts To The HoloLens teamDisney Metaverse division closed March, and Walmart followed suit and ended the Roblox-based metaverse. project.With billions of dollars invested and breathtaking hype around half-baked concepts, thousands, if not tens of thousands people who lose their jobs.
But the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it was revealed that Zuckerberg and the company that sparked the Metaverse frenzy had moved to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg in the March update and Meta in “The single biggest investment is advancing AI and building it into all of our products,” Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told CNBC in April, telling Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s Together with Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, he said he is currently spending most of his time on AI.the company even has Stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisersapart from spend more than $100 billion on research and development Our mission is to be “metaverse first”. Zuckerberg may be I propose to develop a game for the Quest headset is an investment of sorts and the writing is on the wall. The meta completes in the metaverse.
Has anyone learned their lesson?
The idea of virtual worlds and collective online experiences may somehow live on, but the Capital-M metaverse is dead. . It is survived by new ideas such as the aforementioned generative AI and self-driving cars. Despite this long line of disappointments, let’s be clear: The death of the Metaverse should arguably be remembered as his one of the most historic failures in the history of technology.
I doubt Mark Zuckerberg had any real interest in the “metaverse”. Because he didn’t seem to define it beyond slightly tweaked Facebook with avatars and awkward hardware. It was a means to boost stock prices rather than an actual vision for the future of human interaction. I lined up behind this half-baked idea.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has apparently stepped away from the metaverse is a terrible accusation for everyone who followed him and who still sees him as a visionary tech leader. It has also caused some serious reflection among the venture capital community, which recklessly followed Zuckerberg in blowing billions of dollars in a hype cycle based on the flimsiest press release wording possible. In a just world, Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as CEO of Meta (In the real world, this is not really possible).
Zuckerberg deceived everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced the industry of his followers to follow his wacky obsession, and killed it the moment Wall Street began to take an interest in a different idea. .there is no reason for the man who has oversaw tens of thousands of layoffs You should run a big company. There is no meta future with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm. It stagnates, then dies, following the metaverse into the proverbial grave.
Ed Gitron CEO of EZPR, is the country’s technology and business public relations agency.He is also the author of the Tech and Culture newsletter where is your ed.
