The Metaverse was Doomed from the Start

The metaverse is finally dead and it couldn’t come soon enough. Well, perhaps not completely dead, but it's on life support. The impending death of the metaverse may come as a surprise to Mark Zuckerberg but I saw it coming from miles away and I’m sure many other people did too. I have to admit though, I was initially interested in the metaverse. I’m always interested in new technologies. So when I heard of the metaverse I had to look further into it and see what it was all about. After I looked into it, I was not convinced.

When I investigated the metaverse, I looked at review videos on YouTube and searched the internet for screenshots of what this new world looked like. I saw what was apparently Zuckerberg's dream. A world where people looked like legless Nintendo Wii Sports video game characters. I thought to myself, is this the future? I hope not.

Then I saw Zuckerberg was beginning to aim the metaverse at businesses. I saw that legless Nintendo Wii Sports world again. This time the animated characters were in an office. While the animation looked slightly better, I still wasn’t buying it. I just didn’t see the appeal.

I enjoy working from home. I don’t need to see my coworkers in a virtual room that appears to be an office. Using zoom is just fine with me. But this is what Zuckerberg was marketing to the business world, a virtual world where people that have no legs meet for important business conversations and presentations. Why would a business pay for this?

However, the most surprising part about the metaverse to me was that the media and many large corporations were getting on the metaverse bandwagon. Could these companies have really been this out of touch? The Verge published a long interview with Mark Zuckerberg going into detail about the metaverse. Since then, McKinsey developed articles on integrating the metaverse in businesses.

Now with the progress of artificial intelligence (AI), all these companies are shifting towards AI. A Meta shareholder even issued an open letter to Zuckerberg that basically asked for Meta to focus on its core competency of social media and work on using AI to increase the competitiveness of their platforms. Now, to me this sounds like a much better idea than the metaverse. AI seems like something that could compliment Meta’s platforms, while the metaverse seemed like a bad gimmick.

Fortunately, the metaverse will be dead soon. While we can thank the next tech trend of AI for the death of the metaverse, I’m thinking that the metaverse would have died anyways. The metaverse had no real customer in mind and just wasn’t practical. No one wanted to wear a clunky headset to be transported into an animated world that looked like it was designed in the early 2000s.

This tech trend of the metaverse was short but bad. Really, the tech itself was bad. Fortunately, the metaverse trend died quicker than 3-D TVs. Now that Meta is pivoting towards AI, let’s see if they actually do something with this tech that benefits their company.

Written by Wes Cooper

2023-05-15