Mark Zuckerberg is selling the world a great vision that, if successful, will dominate the future of computers

Tram Ho

Mark Zuckerberg is making terrible efforts to sell the world his great vision of the future through the virtual universe.

Mark Zuckerberg đang bán cho thế giới tầm nhìn vĩ đại, nếu thành công sẽ bá chủ tương lai của máy tính - Ảnh 1.

Bloomberg begins the article saying that, the best that can be said about Mark Zuckerberg’s terrible efforts to “sell” the world his great vision of the future is that “he is trying very hard”.

On October 11, Zuckerberg hosted a promotional event attended by several thousand programmers, reporters and Meta employees. They were all logged into the company’s virtual world to see Mark and his associates, appearing as animated virtual characters.

At Connect 2022, the company’s annual event for VR software and VR device developers, expectations for the Meta Platform fell. In an industry where users are expected to run into the billions, Facebook’s flagship virtual reality app Horizon World had only about 300,000 users as of the end of February – the time when the company was working. run an ad at the Super Bowl.

That number has dropped to less than 200,000 since then, despite expensive marketing efforts and Mark’s appearance on one of the world’s most popular podcast shows.

Activities inside the virtual universe suffer from a general bleak situation: “There are rarely any girls in Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party, and in Murder Village, there is no one to… kill”. Even according to the WSJ’s research, Meta employees are not interested in Horizon. But, on the surface, they seem forced to “fall in love” with Horizon.

“Everyone in our organization should make it their mission to love Horizon World,” said Vishal Shal, Vice President of Metaverse. “Come in, schedule a time to work with colleagues or friends.”

Of course, this command is working well. The New York Times reported that Facebook employees used an acronym with the symbol “MMH” for a number of projects related to the virtual universe. This acronym translates to “make Mark happy” – that is, “make Mark happy”.

To be fair, Meta has built a successful video game business since buying Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. Its virtual universe division, Reality Labs, reported $2.3 billion in revenue. in 2021 – largely from Quest 2 VR device sales.

However, for every dollar of VR revenue, Meta lost $5 last year. Instead of focusing on trying to improve the economics of the business, Zuckerberg is chasing growth. Meta’s latest device, the $1,500 Quest Pro model, is aimed at not only gamers but also office workers – an area that is said to have great potential.

Speaking at the Quest Pro launch event, Mark stated that his ambition with these high-end devices – which are three times the price of Quest 2, is that they can replace laptops and desktops in the office, thanks to Effective software runs in it. This leads to some interesting things, showing a clear gap between the worldview of Mark – a super-billionaire with a passion for work and the worldview of people who don’t run a multinational company from a real estate. 1,500 acre estate in Hawaii.

Mark talks about how the “cool” virtual world will “overlay your work and the people you interact with right over the real world”.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet showed off a screen to show off an order for 60,000 Quest 2s from his consulting firm for meetings, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also announced: Microsoft 365 will be in the virtual universe of Facebook.

It’s easy to see why Microsoft made the above decision, but it’s hard to see how – or whatever Zuckerberg announced last week – will inspire people to fall in love with the virtual universe.

Meta is introducing an expensive remote working technology at a time when most CEOs in the US are asking employees to go back to the office and cut staff. In fact, Meta has poured a lot of money into virtual reality – cumulative losses of $27 billion since 2019 – which needs massive adoption to make this bet bear fruit. This probably won’t come from video games – so they switched to selling office equipment.

Of course, Meta’s problems are beyond sales. The hardware and software that Zuckerberg announced seemed overpriced and undervalued. Quest Pro costs about the same as a high-end laptop but with just an hour or two of battery life and a limit on processing power.

All of this makes it far from a PC replacement. During his talk, Zuckerberg boasted that Horizon characters will have legs in the near future. He even illustrated by jumping up and down. Two days later, Meta said that the VR leg that CEO Mark showed off was not displayed using Quest Pro’s artificial intelligence software.

Zuckerberg’s defenders, mostly Silicon Valley colleagues, seem worried that the super-billionaire’s feelings might be hurt. As such, they urge consumers and critics to take a cautious, wait-and-see approach. Investor Michael Seibel tweeted: “Those who are denigrating Zuck and Oculus should shut up. He’s trying to invent something new. Just give him some time to try.”

Seibel is right about one thing. There have been anecdotes about Zuckerberg being determined to challenge himself in a similar way. Mark seems to be invigorated. He was willing to risk the very successful business Meta had by pouring tens of billions of dollars into a long-term bet to own the future of computing.

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Source : Genk