That would be the low risk strategy. Just run it as a cash cow value business and extract as much profit as possible until it dies.
However, Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to bet the company on AR/VR and is investing $10B into that area. If they get it wrong then he'll look like an idiot. If they get it right by building the next major platform for humans to communicate then he'll look like a visionary genius. We won't know which for at least 10 years.
People gave Google a ton of crap for buying YouTube for 1.6 billion (~16% of annual revenue at the time). That $10B FB spent is more like 8.5% of their revenue.
I’m skeptical of the metaverse, but I was also pretty skeptical of user-generated video. And given their current ad take, $10B is not a crazy bet.
Everyone wanted to watch and share video clips on their computer directly on the web without and without having to care about codecs, file formats, and hosting.
No one wants to have business meetings wearing VR headsets or give NFTs to virtual panhandlers or any of the other silly usecases for a modernized version of Lawnmower Man.
Maybe? I generally agree with you, but playing devils advocate:
What does the generation raised on Minecraft and Roboblox do when they grow up? They spent their adolescence in virtual worlds. Do they grow out of that? Or does it start to bleed into other parts of daily life?
VR still seems clunky as hell, but if the tech gets less obtrusive I can imagine a world where a sizable chunk of daily life is mediated through a headset.
Find a new form of escapism? A large driver of kids and teens seeking out escapism like this is that compulsory education is unsatisfying and they have very little self-determination generally. This isn't new to Minecraft and Robolox. A generation ago, it was watching way too much TV. What are those kids who watched 6 hours a night of TV doing now?
At one point no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous. Metaverse technology is still really clunky today and used only by a few early adopters, but it's entirely possible that the experience will improve a lot in 10 years. Who knows?
Yeah, no. Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time (global pandemic).
Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter. There is no counter-factual where this becomes a success.
I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn. If this is the best they can come up with, whatever of "Meta" that is left in 10 years won't be worth 1/20 of that.
> Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time
They also had a product that worked terribly at the wrong time [0].
> Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter.
Subsidizing it seemed to get a lot more people to buy it over the last few years. I 100% see a world where you don't buy a monitor, you buy a headset to use your computer. Monitors are big, ugly and fragile, and not portable. In 2-5 years when the screen tech is better and I can use a virtual monitor instead of a real one, I will 100% do that, and I think many will. Lots of younger people never buy traditional desktop or laptops.
Also, a lot of "meta verse" dialog came from not-meta, eg web3 NFT shit, so I wouldn't place too much into that being their vision. Part of a strategy for attention is certainly to get people excited, and attaching "meta verse" to random trend du jour seems like a solid way to get attention. There are crypto pumps related to the queens recent death, but that doesn't mean the queen would have wanted anything to do with crypto.
> I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn.
TBF they started to back out of making this their only thing, and they still sell a crap ton of valuable ad space to lots of people. Its not like they abandoned their existing cash cow.
A significant factor to consider with that situation is that the recent widespread use of teleconferencing software wasn't organic.
Many people and organizations that started using it frequently during the last three years only did so because they were forced to, mainly due to absurd and unjustifiable government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions. Otherwise, the remaining adoption was mainly driven by paranoia, and only occasionally by convenience.
We've seen a tendency for such people and organizations to return to in-person interactions as soon as they can, which usually starts the moment that government stops interfering.
While the adoption may have been rapid and widespread, we also see the reverse happening as soon as it's possible to.
Isn't user-generated video mostly dead though? The vast majority of videos on Youtube, at least by viewership hours, seems to be produced by professional youtube creators. These range in scale from the "web content" branch of large media corporations to one person doing research, presenting and editing, but all are effectively just companies. There seem to be very few videos from regular people sharing something interesting. These videos can mostly be found on Facebook, Telegram, imgur gifs, Twitter, etc.
However, Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to bet the company on AR/VR and is investing $10B into that area. If they get it wrong then he'll look like an idiot. If they get it right by building the next major platform for humans to communicate then he'll look like a visionary genius. We won't know which for at least 10 years.