The real challenge about Zuckerberg’s idea of the Metaverse is that it still remains a niche offering, unlike his foray into social media, which was a problem waiting to be solved.
The real challenge about Zuckerberg’s idea of the Metaverse is that it still remains a niche offering, unlike his foray into social media, which was a problem waiting to be solved.
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People accessed the World Wide Web via dial-up connections at the beginning of the Internet era in the early 90s. The bad network took a few minutes to load before the local computer could reach the public switched telephone network.
Once a connection is established, people can browse the ‘net’ and access content (mainly text based). The web page will take some time to load using a dial-up connection. The time it took to load was called ‘buffering’. Sometimes, you can make a cup of tea and return to your computer monitor, and the page may still be only half ready. co-founder of facebook Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Adventure In some ways it is almost identical to a three-decade old dial-up modem.
About a year ago, in an effort to distance the headlines from whistle-blower Frances Haugen and her revelations that Facebook contributed to damage ranging from misinformation on the platform to the impact on teen mental health, the social media firm said it Moving on to the next big thing in tech: the Metaverse. Zuckerberg’s idea was to tie the disparate digital worlds together as one big fabric.
The idea originated from Neil Stephenson’s three-decade-old novel snow accident, Facebook began to gain traction after the boss renamed his company Meta Platforms Inc. and doubled down on investment in virtual reality (VR). Some estimates suggest that the metaverse could be an $800 billion opportunity by the end of 2024.
But the transition cost was high for Facebook as it lost $10 billion in its Reality Labs division as it built the business that would power the metaverse. In January, for the first time since Meta revealed the numbers for its hardware division, which includes Oculus virtual reality headsets, it The parent’s quarter saw a decline Up 8% in the three months ending December compared to a year ago.
At the time, the company was also affected by changes to Apple’s iOS software that made it difficult for Facebook to sell targeted ads. The high cost of switching to the Metaverse and the impact of the iPhone maker’s software changes made the transition difficult for the social media company.
Investors weren’t happy as the stock fell nearly a fifth in after-hours trading. Since then the company’s shares have declined. and the recent announcement by Zuckerberg when he revealed the $1,500 VR headset on Tuesday did not excite investors As he watched the meta leader dive deeper into the metaverse without a clear path to return on investment.
The real challenge about Zuckerberg’s idea of the Metaverse is that it still remains a niche offering, unlike his foray into social media, which was a problem waiting to be solved. When he built the social network out of his Harvard dorm room, it was a product for a time when people wanted to find new ways to stay connected while traveling far away from each other.
With the metaverse, it seems like a solution in search of problems. Parallel to the dial-up modem days, the metaverse has been buffering, and it’s not clear in the size or shape that the page will load.