So. Meta.

The Meta announcement is interesting and unexpected.

I was sure we’d see an Alphabet-like non-committal name that would be a blank canvas holding company for a slate of endeavors. (Library was my guess. Get it? Full of…books?)

Instead of anything Altria-like the new name is intended to be a retail name and proposes a specific and new direction for the whole kit and kaboodle. That’s bold - and a move as bold as that means that someone visionary is still at the helm and allowed to make big calls. That’s good for a shot at meaningful growth.

What I’m trying to digest is whether this direction is either A: a good idea or B: best executed by this company.

On the pro side, Facebook has proven itself an eager and competent steward and builder of VR, diligently putting brilliant minds like Caitlin Kalinowski to advancing the state of the art and then making the results affordable available. Several generations in, it looks like it will be challenging for others to catch up. Magic Leap appears to have imploded in a puff of pixie dust; Google has after the Glass fiasco hemmed, hawed, and (in authentic Google fashion) defunded its Daydream unit (I’ll wager they’ll resurrect it next year); Robert Scoble continues to insist that Apple’s building something mysteriously transformative that continues to not come to market; Microsoft’s HoloLens seems interesting but hasn’t been targeted at or embraced by consumer despite MSFT savvy with XBox consumer hardware - similar to how Sony hasn’t quite cracked the VR nut either despite decades of effort. Who knows, maybe Nintendo will resurrect Virtual Boy in a Switch attachment? But the competition is mostly in the rear view mirror in a field that requires vast investment and several retail iterations to achieve reasonable results; kind of what we saw happen with DJI and prosumer drones.

But now come the tougher questions:

1) Does consumer AR/VR make sense?

If ever there were a time that immersive VR was going to take off, it would be during a multi-year pandemic when everyone was trapped at home and desperate to connect with each other, see the world, and be entertained. We had the hardware, the connectivity, and everything that in theory was needed for explosive growth (other than perhaps the enormous kink in global supply chain). But as far as I can tell, this didn’t happen. [[UPDATE from a friend: apparently I’m wrong on this and sales did quite well - will update with details]] Now we find ourselves cresting the COVID wave toward re-opening and the idea of real life and going outdoors, actually seeing people, actually traveling the world again is so incredibly delightful that the idea of spending time “under a hood” is not appealing. What if people at the end of the day prefer reality?

AR deserves its own consideration - unlike VR it can be experienced in public and around others. But it violates important social contracts around whether the people around you are being recorded and separately whether or not you are inhabiting the same observed reality as others. If you’re having a conversation with someone and they keep glancing over your shoulder, you are eventually going to turn and look, or ask. But in the case of your glassy-eyed interlocutor it could be they are just checking their email. AR use is rude. There’s a reason glassholes got kicked out of bars and it wasn’t about industrial design. At least when you’re looking at your phone, I can tell you’re elsewhere.

2) Is Facebook the right company to build a metaverse?

If you asked folks in the early 90’s what they thought the internet was going to be, a lot of what you heard was around sex and pseudonyms. Nobody was going to know who you really were. You’d have seven different online personas in as many different communities and nobody could link them. You’d express as different genders, create new cultures, and spend vast amounts of time at home in front of your computer.

One of the many surprises about how things panned out in the last few decades is that people are actually themselves online. They post pictures of their meatspace bodies and activities and faces and talk about actually physically going places and seeing humans they like face to face. Sure, a lot is touched up and cropped out so the “real” lives we see others living are airbrushed, but the surprising part (at least to the 90’s prognosticators) is that it’s grounded in reality. I’d argue Facebook really championed this new normal around real names, faces, and authentic expression. So it leaves me uncertain about whether Facebook would be the right home for fantasy and alternate reality. It feels the opposite. (And I’m grateful for a workplace that encouraged me to bring my authentic self to work!)

The other axis here has to do with being a platform. The Metaverse is nothing if not a platform for developers, for code. Facebook’s history on platform support of developers is as checkered as Google’s on chat apps. And Facebook is nothing if not centralized and first-party, as one of the only major players besides Apple and Netflix to not offer a meaningful cloud service for developers — even after going through the trouble of acquiring and then winding down the fabulous Parse team. Can they build a solution that is at once decentralized, cross-integrated, and welcoming to developers? It would be a tall order for any company, but is even more so for a company whose most difficult regulatory encounters involved the consequences of trusting third party developers with platform access.

So: it’s bold (which I like) and doesn’t make sense to me, which I also like, because if you can’t make the olds like me roll their eyes and say “WTH?” then you probably aren’t doing anything very interesting.