Four years ago, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook unveiled a bold rebrand and revealed a bold ambition: it was going to start focusing on the metaverse.
The tech giant would now be known as Meta — that’s Greek for beyond, you know — as it shifted its focus from social media to virtual reality.
Zuckerberg was determined that the metaverse would be the future. The billionaire envisioned a world where we would spend our working days in a digital office, experiencing human connection with people thousands of miles away.
But from the start, Meta’s efforts were met with derision… for several reasons.
The company’s pivot coincided with major economies emerging from coronavirus lockdowns, with many of us desperate to get out into the real world. Consumers were buzzing at the prospect of paying the best for VR headsets.
Worse, tech journalists weren’t buying it either.
As New York Times columnist Kevin Roose tweeted all the way back in 2022:
“It’s truly staggering that Meta spent over $10 billion on VR last year and the graphics in its flagship app still look worse than a 2008 Wii game.”
Undeterred, Zuckerberg continued to throw large amounts of cash behind his pet project. His company’s metaverse development is based in a division called Reality Labs, which has lost more than $70 billion so far. And with each passing quarter, as the bill got bigger and bigger, investors got more nervous.
This brings us to now. Bloomberg reported that the tech giant plans to cut its spending on the metaverse by up to 30% starting next year — and instead turn its attention to other emerging technologies. Some analysts have even predicted that doomed projects like Horizon Worlds could close altogether.
Wall Street was absolutely thrilled with the news, with Meta’s share price soaring higher as the company confirmed it was shifting investments. But you could argue that this was all inevitable, with Zuckerberg diverting much of his attention to artificial intelligence instead.
Nevertheless, this is the latest incident where Zuckerberg has painfully backed away from one of his big ideas — and it’s not the first time it’s crypto-related.
Facebook (as it was known at the time) also poured huge resources into Libra, which was intended to be a digital currency that could be used by the social network’s billions of users. But the project drew strong criticism from the US and the EU, which worried about a private company wielding huge influence over the payments landscape. Although his plans were hastily revised and watered down, they were abandoned entirely after a seemingly endless number of retakes.
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