Four years ago, days after Mark Zuckerberg debuted the Metaverse, I wrote a Six Things commentary that began: "The vision of a metaverse laid out by Mark Zuckerberg last week is bonkers. Nutso on steroids. It won't be realized in my lifetime, yours or his, even if some of the wildest claims about longevity come true and we all live to be 150."
Since then, the Metaverse group within the company Zuckerberg renamed after what I referred to in that commentary as "a fever dream for gamers" has racked up $70 billion in losses, and Bloomberg and the New York Times reported last week that he is planning to cut staff by between 10% and 30%, possibly in January.
So, in retrospect, I'm just sorry I pulled my punches. :)
Trashing the Metaverse on Day One was not a remotely hard call, because it violated one of the cardinal rules of innovation: As much as possible, an innovation has to fit within the existing work environment or lifestyle of the prospective user. Yet the Metaverse required radical changes in how individuals interact — with, as far as I could discern, no appreciable benefits.
It's worth taking a minute to look at where Meta went wrong, because the mistake is awfully tempting for all of us.
The Metaverse assumes that people want to live online a huge percentage of the time. You have to produce an avatar to act as you and learn all sorts of new behaviors to interact with other avatars and with everything else that populates the online world. (I tried this a couple of years into the Metaverse experiment, courtesy of a consulting firm that was enthusiastic about its prospects, and it was still quite hard just to maneuver, let alone to talk with others' avatars or to conduct a transaction.)
The rule of thumb in Silicon Valley is that an innovation has to be 10 times better than anything it is intended to replace, yet the Metaverse was far less useful than the Zoom calls and other technologies we already used, while requiring huge changes in people's routines.
Apple made a similar mistake with its Vision Pro virtual reality device — and yes, I trashed that, too, right after it was announced at the beginning of last year. I wrote: "There's simply no reason to strap a 1 1/2-pound device to your face (nearly the weight of a quart of milk) and put a three-quarter-pound battery in your back pocket so you can type with your two index fingers in mid-air while strangers or officemates gawk at you. Not when some combination of today's laptops, tablets and phones will do just fine."
The Vision Pro has been a dud for precisely the same reasons the Metaverse has flopped.
By contrast, Metaverse has a budding hit with the AI it has built into Ray-Ban "smart display" sunglasses. The capabilities are still pretty limited but are enough to get started: You can use voice commands to snap photos, record videos, send messages, make calls, and ask questions of Meta's AI. And Meta isn't asking customers to do anything out of the ordinary. Just about everybody wears sunglasses. Besides, Ray-Bans look cool.
When you look at the history of major technology innovations, they almost all replace something similar. Smartphones replaced iPods, which replaced the Walkman, which replaced transistor radios. Smartphones also replaced early cellular phones, which replaced hardwired phones in homes. There was almost no need for changes in behavior; everything just became easier and better.
Note that once you get a new device into people's lives, like a smartphone, you can start to get them to change behaviors that have nothing to do with the original purpose — when I first saw a smartphone demo, some 25 years ago, I had no idea I'd be doing my banking and shopping on a phone, or listening to podcasts on it and having it monitor my driving.
The insurance industry seems to mostly get this principle, that innovation has to fit into existing behaviors. That's why we're seeing so many dashboards that incorporate the advances in generative AI, gathering information and making evaluations in the background and presenting them to underwriters, claims professionals or agents and brokers as part of their normal workflow. I think chatbots were initially seen too much as a standalone technology but are now being integrated much better into the customer experience. Whisker Labs' Ting device has taken off because a customer simply has to plug it into a wall socket to have it monitor for electrical issues and prevent home fires. Roost built another Predict & Prevent business by offering batteries that can be plugged into existing smoke detectors and ping a customer's cellphone when an alarm sounds, in case they aren't at home to hear it.
Still, the principle is worth keeping in mind, because the temptation — which I've witnessed across industries in my decades of writing about innovation — is to think that what you're doing is so useful that people will adapt to you, freeing you from worrying about how to adapt to them.
If Meta and Apple can make that mistake, you can, too.
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. While I've patted myself on the back for dumping on the Metaverse and Vision Pro right out of the gate, I need to acknowledge that I've made mistakes, too. While I can't recall a time when I savaged an idea or product and been wrong, I've certainly been too optimistic about how quickly change would happen. I try to live by the Silicon Valley dictum that "you should never confuse a clear view for a short distance," yet, well, I sometimes do.
For instance, I wrote an article in 1991 or 1992 that said paper forms no longer had a reason to live, given that we could all input information into personal computers connected to whomever or whatever needed the data. That was more than three decades ago, and, hmmmm....
But at least the article only ran on the front page of the second section of the Wall Street Journal, so only a few people read it, right?