One of the snarkiest fights raging among our digital overlords is over a technology that does not yet exist: the metaverse. So in love is Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg with its promise that he rebranded the company as Meta and bet his business on the idea. In spite of widespread scepticism, he has kept the faith, running up more than $27bn of operating losses in the company’s metaverse division over the past three years. This week, Meta launched a new Quest Pro headset priced at $1,500 and announced a partnership with Microsoft.
Yet, as Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook has acidly pointed out, it is still not clear that ordinary people know what the metaverse means. Meta’s conception remains “ambiguous and hypothetical”, says Snap’s founder Evan Spiegel. The company’s rivals are always going to be detractors, but they have a point. Meta’s investors are growing restless too: the company’s share price has dropped 62 per cent this year.
The irony is that Zuckerberg is right that there are fortunes to be made in the metaverse, a network of immersive 3D digital worlds that he believes will one day become the primary way we live our lives and spend our time. The trouble is that Meta seems unlikely to be the main beneficiary. Call it first mover disadvantage.