Meta is experiencing the most severe problem in its 18-year history. In the past year, the company’s value has decreased by 70%. Mark Zuckerberg laid off 11,000 employees last week. If Meta’s situation does not improve, additional cost-cutting measures and layoffs are likely to follow.
Meta’s fall from grace has multiple causes, including the weakening global economy, Apple’s anti-tracking feature, and TikTok’s formidable competition. Also, the number of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users is not increasing as rapidly as it once did.
And then there’s the enormous Metaverse project, which costs tens of billions of dollars annually and won’t generate revenue for ten years.
The Metaverse’s wager arrived at a bad time
Meta’s problems are not solely attributable to Zuckerberg’s costly obsession with the Metaverse, which many individuals find difficult to comprehend. But the high-risk wager is made at the worst possible time when the company is experiencing problems on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Last month, Matthew Ball, an investor, and proponent of the metaverse told The New York Times the pressures that Meta’s business will face in 2022 are sharp, significant, and unrelated to the metaverse.
That may be a bit of an exaggeration, given that Meta’s stock price began falling shortly after Facebook changed its name to Meta and before the company’s early 2022 announcement of disastrous quarterly results.
However, Ball’s joke is different: not only did Meta choose the incorrect time, but she may also be too early. There is a possibility that almost everything Mark has said about the metaverse is true, except that it won’t occur when he predicted.
VR and AR could take much more time
This sounds like a history book summary of the VR and AR industries over the past decade. Anyone who has been paying attention to the industry during this period is aware that technology is simultaneously evolving quickly and slowly.
There have been early sales successes for virtual reality, but it is unlikely that many people regularly wear their headsets. This is also due to the shape, which is finally getting better after ten years of this VR wave but is still not the best.
What do you think of the concept of augmented reality? Except for smartphone augmented reality, the sister technology has not yet appeared in everyday devices, despite its great potential.
Since the release of Google Glass ten years ago, AR headsets for the general public have remained a myth, meaning that their development is delayed annually by a few years. Even business titans, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens, are on the verge of failure.
Meta needs staying power
We’re increasingly convinced that virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are not as advanced as most people believe, and that even though a lot has happened so far, a lot more will occur before they leave their infancy. If progress continues along the same straight line as it has for the past decade.
In 15–20 years, virtual reality will be ready for prime time, and in 20–30 years, augmented reality will reach its full potential. If this is the case, we must consider the implications for the industry.
How many innovative ideas and startups have there been in virtual reality since 2016 or earlier? The majority of them failed because the technology was unprepared.
They were ahead of their time. Yes, but that provides little solace, and it causes Mark Zuckerberg concern.
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