DailyPost 2624
METAVERSE ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK!
With Facebook being rechristened as Meta in 2021 and Zuckerberg being hellbent on creating a new world, others also reciprocated in a similar manner. The giants smelt big business as and when it happened, they seemingly threw their might behind it. Nobody wanted to miss out on the party of the century. Accenture’s report 2022 showed the promise behind this dream. Around two years down the line the dream seems to have frittered, and there are no milestones in sight. We have reached a stage where we don’t even know the next milestone and who is working on it, if any.
Why did the fanfare of the Metaverse ends in a whimper? Was it just a hype, trying to pull it off to some level to fast commercial gains or there was an inherent commitment? Was there any collaboration at the backend for this sort of a transformational project to happen? When did it start getting haywire? Or was it just a created a narrative that fell flat. The harsh reality is that today there is no talk about Metaverse and certainly in the public domain. There is no consistency or direction in sight anywhere. Even its building blocks are not progressing at the pace that was anticipated.
Meta was the leader of the Metaverse story and it is exactly here that the red flag came from. Meta platforms invested billions in 2022 in Metaverse and still the revenue kept on dropping year on year. The management was forecasting bigger losses in its Metaverse segment in 2023. The company had invested $13.7 billion, expecting it to be worthwhile with time. If it failed it would be a colossal waste. Presumably the shareholders were not fine with it. The products being created at Meta for this purpose were also not up to the mark. Meta lost the steam and zeal for transformative research and development.
Catching or giving up on new trends are infectious. This was the case here too. The other elements – the paradigm shifting technologies also started slowing up. The insatiable desire to converge and create magic did not happen at all. In the meantime, ChatGPT stole the thunder and the tech world took a totally different trajectory. Since 30th of Nov. 2022 this has been the running story and continues to this day. AI in the multimedia LLM mode has been declared our tech future and we are moving in that direction. When will the focus come back to Metaverse, no one knows.
HAS METAVERSE TURNED OUT TO BE A PIPEDREAM.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.