Conflicts within Zuckerberg’s metaverse technology

CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announced this October that the company would change its name to “Meta” and become a “metaverse company”, as per the recent Facebook meta news. He presented an illustration of a utopian future that was many years away, in which billions of people would spend innumerable amounts of time in immersive digital environments, working, socialising, and playing games inside metaverse virtual and augmented worlds. But why Facebook change name to meta? To know the answer go through the article.

Since then, Meta Business has invested billions of dollars and assigned thousands of workers to make Zuckerberg’s dream a reality. But Meta’s attempts to develop a metaverse technology have had a rocky start.

The company’s flagship metaverse virtual reality game, Horizon Worlds, remains buggy and unpopular, leading Meta to put in place a “quality lockdown” for the remaining of the year while it reworks the design of the application

The frequent strategy alterations that seem to be based on Zuckerberg’s whims rather than a specific goal have been criticised by some Meta employees.

A senior official at Meta complained that the amount of money the company had spent on experimental projects made him “sick to my stomach” as the Meta executives butted over the company’s metaverse strategy.

More than a dozen former and current Meta employees were interrogated about the company’s efforts to reshape the business, and The New York Times also obtained internal correspondence. The folks commented under the condition of anonymity as they were not allowed to speak about intimate topics in the general populace.

At a developer conference today, Meta is expected to introduce a brand-new VR headset in addition to other new metaverse technology. The company is in a race to reinvent itself to offset losses in other aspects of its business, so the stakes are high.

Both Facebook Meta and Instagram, Meta’s two main revenue generators, are losing younger users to TikTok. Apple’s modifications on privacy settings to its mobile operating system have lost Meta billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

The stock price of the company has dropped by about 60% over the previous year, reflecting not just the broader market turbulence but also some investors’ skepticisms that the metaverse would become highly lucrative at any time soon. The company announced that it will suspend the majority of recruiting in late September, and Zuckerberg has notified staff that layoffs may be forthcoming.

Matthew Ball, an investor and metaverse expert whose advice Zuckerberg has sought, said, “The pressures Meta business is facing in 2022 are acute, significant and not metaverse related. And there is a risk that almost everything Mark has outlined about the metaverse is right, except the timing is farther out than he imagined”

Zuckerberg successfully restructured his organization a decade ago, shifting its attention away from desktops and toward how its products functioned on cell phones. When he asserted that investing in the metaverse will enable Meta to transition from one technology period to the next, he gave a similar signal last year.

For the immediate future, Meta’s success will depend on its ability to provide metaverse virtual reality technologies accessible to the greater population.

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