Facebook Connect 2 has finished and almost nothing went as I predicted (I suck at making predictions for Connects, it seems): there was no Quest 2 Pro, no discount on the Quest 2, no update on Assassin’s Creed VR. But one thing actually went as expected: Facebook announced the creation of a parent company called Meta, which is going to control all products Facebook was involved in.
Meta has been the last news mentioned at this Connect, but actually all the event was conceived just to arrive at this final announcement. When the Connect started, we were all expecting a long session in the keynote about some new hardware announcements, while actually, Zuck told immediately that he wouldn’t have wanted to focus the keynote on hardware, but on talking about the metaverse. And he kept his word. The rest of the event has been different than the previous Oculus/Facebook Connects. Previous events were all about hardware announcements, games announcements, long talks about mindblowing R&D projects. This event was instead all about explaining what is the metaverse.
Zuckerberg and all the other executives spent around 70 minutes just to tell everyone what is the metaverse, and what is the vision that Facebook has for it. They used videos with fake CGI effects to convey the concept of what we will be able to do in the metaverse. They showed that the metaverse will encompass all technologies (from phones to AR and VR headsets), all shades of reality, to let us connect and perform activities together like playing, working, traveling, staying fit, etc… The videos were fake and had no intention to show how the metaverse will be, and the same Mark admitted “there’s a ton we don’t know yet” [about the future metaverse]. They were just there to make people understand easily what the metaverse is and will be.
For the duration of the event, I had the clear impression that Zuck wasn’t talking with me and with the people like me. We of the XR ecosystem already knew everything he was saying about the metaverse, and we know also a lot more. Furthermore, all the parts of the event that could interest us XR people were downplayed: Facebook today announced GTA San Andreas for Quest 2, and this is a piece of great news for us all, but took just 40 seconds of the whole event. The same holds for the new upcoming AI-powered passthrough AR for Quest, which is amazing news for us developers… but it was just briefly mentioned. The Abrash speech, which usually is very long and detailed and full of juicy technical details, took just a few minutes in which he showed projects we already knew about. From my point of view, it has been the most boring Connect I have ever attended!
But as I’ve said, this event was not meant for me or all the other people like me. It was an event meant to tell investors and the general press about the new vision of Facebook. And since when Zuck said some months ago that he wanted to pivot Facebook to become a “metaverse company” and no one understood what he meant, he gave them the best explanation he could give them. He spent more than one hour showing with words and clear visuals what is the metaverse, encompassing all its parts: applications, identity, realities, hardware, software, etc… He also showed what are the advancements that Facebook is doing in all the components of the metaverse, from avatars to applications, not to mention the hardware. He explained for a lot of time why the metaverse is important, why it is the future, how Facebook is committed to it, and then he came to the natural conclusion: Facebook will focus all the upcoming years on it.
The name change is the icing on the cake of all of this: if Facebook wants to focus on the Metaverse, it can’t be just Facebook, a social media with a complicated reputation. It must be a new company with a broad and long vision, and that will be Meta, the new parent company of Facebook.
Zuck has clearly shown that the metaverse is the inevitable future and that Facebook, now Meta, is full steam ahead in its pursuit. The new company will focus on two businesses:
- The social media applications, for the present
- The metaverse, for the future.
And that is another great part of its pitch. Big companies in the past have been disrupted by new technologies (yeah Kodak, I’m looking at you) and companies that want to dominate the future have to look several years ahead. Facebook has dominated the social media technologies, but its executives know that social media are the present, but probably won’t be the future. So their moonshot is chasing the next technology disruption that is the metaverse. But they won’t crazily go all in for that but will try to keep both business units. In the present, they’ll make piles of cash with social media, and use that money to grow the metaverse business. And when technology will be ready, Facebook will be at the forefront of the metaverse and can still be one of the major companies of the future… keeping making enormous amounts of money and having an insane amount of power even on this new platform. Facebook has shown its vision for its next 10 years as a company and has also made clear the business viability of its plan.
Meta will be a way for Facebook to start from scratch building a reputation, but don’t expect anything different from this company. In its pitch of the metaverse, Zuck talked about targeted ads and it stressed again the importance of ads when talking about the creators’ economy. He also stressed that Facebook/Meta wants the metaverse to be for everyone, so it will keep selling under cost headsets and offering free tools for creators. We all know where this is going to head: Meta will still be an ad company, and again, this is perfectly in line with the pitch he has made about its vision. Meta will go from the ads of today to the ads of tomorrow in the next 10 years.
But it will be much more: building both the hardware, the software, the distribution platform, and the developer tools, Meta aims at being much more powerful than the already very powerful Facebook of today. Meta aims to be one of the dominant companies of the future metaverse, being one of the most relevant companies in many of its related technologies. Its business will not be only ads, but also the one of being a platform: if besides the ads, it has also the control of a big share of the creators’ economy in the metaverse, it can earn an insane amount of monoey.
Zuck is smart and knows that no one can own the metaverse (this is one of the seven rules of the metaverse by Tony Parisi)… one of the key sentences of the event was “the metaverse is not something we build, but something we build for”. Facebook knows that the metaverse is like the Internet, it has no owner, but what companies can do is build tools and infrastructure for it that become popular, that become new de-facto standards: Google doesn’t own the internet, but it is an invaluable tool for the Internet, and the Internet as we know it wouldn’t exist without Google. And Facebook wants to become exactly that: a big powerful platform inside the metaverse.
Zuck talked about openness, and honestly, I believe him: if he wants to dominate the creator’s economy, creators must be able to use Meta’s tool from whatever platform, not only Facebook headsets… exactly like Facebook runs on all mobile devices so that it can perform its ads business everywhere.
He also talked a bit about privacy, and it was a bit embarrassing: I could feel his discomfort during that part, and I caught his eyes reading what he had to say. He sounded very fake, and I don’t think that I’m going to trust Meta about this. I get that Meta won’t be only about ads, but it will still be also about ads, and in a world fully digital, data will be the new gold, so I don’t think that Meta will stop harvesting data.
We don’t know if Facebook will succeed in its efforts of dominating the metaverse, but I am pretty sure it will do everything in its power to do that. And it has thrown down the gauntlet to its competitors, starting from Apple. The news about Meta was announced by Zuckerberg saying “There’s one more thing”, the famous sentence said by Steve Jobs before launching its new products.
It was made on purpose to challenge Apple. Zuck hinted during the event that Facebook has to adhere to the unfair rules of the platform hosting its apps, and he wants Facebook to be different from the others that pose such strict rules. He was referring to the new privacy rules on the App Store and he hinted to the fact that Facebook wants to become a platform for creators for the metaverse, something similar to what Apple is today for mobile. As he told in his famous letter of some years ago, he wants to dominate the next technological platform, and not be dominated by others like Apple and Google. But I don’t think that it will be so easy: the stakes are very high, and its competitors won’t stay just there looking at Meta becoming one of the major platforms of the metaverse. We all know that Apple is working on XR headsets (some rumors remind this us every week), and it has a more powerful brand, great expertise in building hardware, and the best AR platform out there (ARKit). Apple is a strong believer in the immersive future too, and will do its best to dominate it and to impose its values, like the one of privacy, that are so different from the ones by Facebook.
Let the fight begin.
(Header image is a screenshot from Facebook Connect)