A sense of false complacency spreads across the Internet when reports suggest that Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse is in trouble. This is what happened last week when my colleague Kurt Wagner revealed Meta Platforms’ intention to reduce the expenses of the Reality Labs division, which is responsible for this experimental technology, by up to 30%. Henry Blodgett, famous for promoting failed Internet stocks, said: “In the end it was a good try, now let’s move on to other things.” The Wall Street Journal described this decision as a “shift” from “a vision that had been in place for years.” Investors cheered with joy. “Potential cost reductions may partially offset historical spending on building Meta’s AI infrastructure,” TD Securities analysts wrote, estimating cost savings of $5 billion to $6 billion. Meta shares ended the week up around 4%. Zuckerberg is moving to reduce Metaverse spending on the Metaverse bet, but this is not a shift away from the Metaverse. This is a renaming process. For the second time, Meta’s CEO reshaped his ambitions to make his spending more palatable to Wall Street, and it worked. The metaverse has long been considered Zuckerberg’s craziest project. It has lost $71 billion since 2021 without achieving significant results. The company shipped just under a million Quest headsets, considered the gateway to the metaverse, worldwide in the second quarter of this year. As for the “Horizon Worlds” platform of the “Meta” company, which is a virtual space for living and interaction, looks lonely. The Verge, a tech news site, sarcastically noted, “Number of ready players: none.” Insist on the “crazy” goal, but if ridicule and poor sales were enough to keep Zuckerberg from his passion for this project, he would have abandoned it years ago. To view the impending cuts – part of the Meta’s broader austerity measures – as evidence of a change of heart would be a mistake, or a misunderstanding of its goal of building “the one” device that will one day bring us into the metaverse. Two important developments have occurred in the past two years that have influenced the company’s thinking and led to these planned cuts. Infographic: What Did “Metaverse” Add to Zuckerberg? The first was the failure of Apple to enter this sector. The company that makes iPhones hasn’t offered any real technical innovation that the Meta Virtual Reality Lab team hasn’t solved before, nor any unprecedented creative uses. However, the user interface was nicer and more intuitive. Meta recently appointed a CEO who was responsible for its development. The second was the strong performance of Ray-Ban smart glasses from Meta. EssilorLuxottica, which manufactured the device, announced in October that it was preparing to ship up to 10 million units annually. Meta acquired a stake of approximately 3% in the company. Weaker competition means less spending. These events indicated to Meta the possibility of reducing spending on research and development, which was cautiously increased in anticipation of a tough and long-term competition with Apple in the field of high-quality virtual and mixed reality. This competition, which could turn into a fierce war between gaming devices, did not happen. Alternatively, Meta could focus on a product that consumers seem to want (glasses) rather than a product they don’t want (headphones). It changes the course of action, but it does not change the end goal. Initially, Zuckerberg’s plan was to prioritize large, full-featured headsets, which he could later scale down, along the lines of the personal computing path. Apple is exploring entering the field of smart glasses to compete with Miata, but consumers are clearly saying that it should start as small as possible, even if its capabilities are lower, and work to add features later. Eventually, as Zuckerberg has insisted for more than a decade, there will come a time when full mixed reality—the metaverse—can be achieved in glasses that are indistinguishable from regular glasses. To make all of this happen, Zuckerberg created a new design studio within the company. “Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material,” he wrote last week. On Friday, the company announced its acquisition of Limitless, a company specializing in wearable artificial intelligence, for an undisclosed sum. The company makes a wearable necklace that records and analyzes conversations. This focus on AI in wearable development gives Zuckerberg additional cover to continue working on the metaverse while keeping investors away. “Glasses are the ultimate form of both AI and the metaverse,” he said last year. Nothing in the upcoming layoffs suggests he’s changing his mind today. Expecting Zuckerberg to abandon the metaverse is like expecting Elon Musk to stop publishing on the “X” platform. It’s true that it’s embarrassing at times, and it’s true that it’s cost the “Meta” company huge amounts of money, and it’s true that investors would prefer it to stop. But he can’t hold back: There’s a sci-fi world out there, and as long as he runs Meta, Zuckerberg is determined to get there. If his words are true, come and see how his critics say they believed in him all along.
