Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta corporation has spent billions to create a Metaverse. However, I think that the project is doomed to be a failure.
There are multiple reasons to think that investors are just going to continue losing money by hanging onto their Meta shares.
- How bad must society be that it is more appealing to wear a heavy VR set rather than deal with real life? The metaverse is intended to somewhat replicate the real world in the “metaverse” — and make it visually interesting and interactive. However, most people are happy using run of the mill apps like email, messaging, and video games on their existing computer, tablet, or smartphone rather than to disconnect entirely from reality. If society becomes completely dystopian, with more crime, high inflation, lack of economic opportunities, and limited travel opportunities, this might make sense. Is that what our tech overloads are telling us?
- Zuckerberg seems to be creating a metaverse that appeals to him rather than actual customers. No one likes the video games and applications that Meta has recently been creating.
- While Zuckerberg was able to create a very successful social networking business, the simple fact of the matter is that the metaverse is a completely new and different business, and one that is likely to fail. There aren’t many examples in the business world where an organization was able to create a fantastically successful business and pivot to a new industry. Would Burger King be successful as a coffee shop? Or a supermarket?
- Facebook/Meta has a poor track record when it comes to protecting people’s privacy. Facebook has created psychological experiments on people without written consent. Facebook has tried to “follow” what people do on their phone — which very few people were even aware of (Apple later put a stop to this with updates to their IOS operating system). Facebook tracks every single thing that you do on their services without any expectations of privacy or any monetary benefit for selling such valuable information. Why would people expect greater levels of privacy when Facebook has not cared about anyone’s privacy in the past?
- Investors are starting to worry that the Metaverse is just one huge money pit. Even if we assume that the metaverse is the “next new thing,” there is the precedent of the dot com era proving that, yes, the internet did become the future, but many of the original internet companies are not with us anymore.
