The untold story of the metaverse idea that Facebook (erm, “Meta”) seems to be so desperate to reboot is that, like Google, their revenues depend on ads quasi-exclusively.
Parmy Olson
In that regard, pushing Facebook as a virtual reality hub promises to harvest even more tracking points from their customers (what you are looking at in real-time, possibly how much your pupils are dilated, etc.) and sell hardware.
I would even suspect that preparing a soft pivot to shift some business to B2B customers could be on the table. Not only because corporations are pretty much the only viable business model for VR as it is, but also because they are the only ones that can afford *at significative scale* to invest in the hardware in the coming years.
This begs the question of… what about Microsoft? If you think about it, Microsoft is now miles ahead of Facebook to position itself as a massive VR leader. They have integrated all the tools necessary from Azure to Xbox and Linkedin, or now obviously Activision. In that regard, Facebook still doesn’t know how to build hardware at scale, doesn’t operate a cloud backbone, and is clueless about content creation (compounded by the fact that generation VR content is exponentially more difficult).
Fast forward three years, with ads revenues dropping, will Facebook be an easy target to be acquired by Microsoft?
Oh, the drama… : )