Also

> these are too niche for whatever Gates is trying here… for his billion dollar bet to succeed nearly everyone would have to be using his PC product.

I don’t think Microsoft / Gates had a “billion dollar bet” that’s comparable to what Zuckerberg is doing with VR and the metaverse.

Meta sells ads on a social network and is using money from that business to subsidize the development of VR applications on the theory that someday meta might make lots of money from VR.

Microsoft sold software for personal computers, made a lot of money doing it, and used that money to fund the development of more software for personal computers. At no point in this early history was there a billion dollar bet.