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At the start of the Internet Age in the early 90s people accessed the world wide web through a dial-up connection. The patchy network used to take a few minutes to load before a local computer can access a public switch telephone network.
Once a connection is established, people could browse ‘the net’ and access content (largely text based). Loading a web page using the dial-up connection would take a while. The time for it to load was called ‘buffering’. At times, you could make a cup of tea and return to your computer monitor, and page might still be only half ready. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse adventure is similar in some ways to the roughly three-decades old dial-up modem.
About a year ago, in an effort to push away the spotlight from whistle-blower Frances Haugen and her revelations on how Facebook contributed to harms ranging from misinformation on the platform to impact on teens’ mental health, the social media firm said it was moving on to the next big thing in tech: metaverse. Zuckerberg’s idea was to stitch together disparate digital worlds as one large fabric.
The idea that originated from Neal Stephenson’s three-decade old novel Snow Crash, started to gain traction after Facebook boss renamed his company as Meta Platforms Inc. and doubled down investments in virtual reality (VR). Some estimates showed that the metaverse could be an $800 billion opportunity by end of 2024.
But the cost of transition for Facebook was high as it blew $10 billion in its Reality Labs division as it built the business that would power the metaverse. In January, for the first time when Meta revealed the numbers for its hardware division, which includes the Oculus virtual reality headsets, it showed a drop in the parent’s quarterly by as much as 8% in the three months ending in December, compared to a year earlier.
At that point, the company was also buffeted by a change in Apple’s iOS software that made it hard for Facebook to sell targeted ads. The high cost of switching to the metaverse and the effect of the iPhone maker’s software changes made the transition difficult for the social media company.
Investors were not happy as the stock tumbled nearly a fifth in after-hours trading. The company’s shares have been down since then. And the recent announcement by Zuckerberg when he revealed a $1,500 VR headset on Tuesday did not enthuse investors as they saw the Meta leader diving deeper into the metaverse without a clear path for return on investments.
The real challenge about Zuckerberg’s idea of a 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 from his Harvard dorm room, it was product for a time when people wanted to find newer ways to stay connected as they travelled farther away from each other.
With the metaverse, it feels like a solution looking for problems. In a parallel to the dial-up modem days, the metaverse is buffering, and it is unclear in shape or size the page will load.
