The Long Farewell to Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
“They glommed onto the term ‘metaverse’ without really understanding the concept,” Wagner James Au, author of “Making a Metaverse That Matters,” said in an interview. “Their efforts on their metaverse strategy seemed completely indifferent to what previous platforms had learned.”
Gift link BTW: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/technology/mark-zuckerber...
Not a single thing FB has launched in the past 10-15 years has been its own innovation, every single has been from the outside (Insta, Whatsapp, etc etc); Zuck even renamed his Fcbook to "Meta" after this big launch with promises of connecting people in the metaverse and all that BS.
But that's not my meta point (yes pun intended).
My meta point and observation is that it is remarkable that people -- tech bros for sure, but also the media, the entire industry of analysts, the service providers, the McKinseys of the world [1] -- all went gaga with Zuck's new-found universe of alternate reality claiming how this metaverse will reap benefits for all.
Just a few choice words from McK [1]:
"While estimates of the potential economic value of the metaverse vary widely, our bottom-up view of consumer and enterprise use cases suggests it may generate up to $5 trillion in impact by 2030—equivalent to the size of the world’s third-largest economy today, Japan..."
"...we estimate it may have a market impact of between $2 trillion and $2.6 trillion on e-commerce by 2030... an impact of $180 billion to $270 billion on the academic virtual learning market, a $144 billion to $206 billion impact on the advertising market, and a $108 billion to $125 billion impact on the gaming market..."
$5 TRILLION. A billion here, a billion there, and it all adds up to 5 trillion. smh
And when McK makes such a claim, what do other analysts do? They follow suit with their own wild-ass claims. All built on hallucinations of their analysts.
Which proves, if it needed proving at all, that nobody in tech (or business or macro-economy in general) really knows what's going to happen 3 years from now, let alone 5-, 10-, or 20- years from now.
There's no reason to believe any wild claims from anyone, including of course the repeat offenders.
Sorry for the rant. It just boggles my mind that people pay any attention to this.
Like few of them looked at Meta's own stock earnings reports -- which they CAN'T bullshit about, or they might go to prison -- where it was clear that the Quest was hardly selling.