How can a major corporation invest $16B for a return equal to the cost of a new, 2023 Ford Bronco for every one of their regular users, or a seat on a private airplane to and across the United States for every single one of the 200,000 regular users?
Welcome to the Metaverse.
An idea that nobody would deny is possible, someday, but was an instant and continual hemorrhage for it’s parent company Facebook. The company’s name has changed to Meta and that means the commitment to the idea of the metaverse is absolute, locked in stone. Imagine a retreat to naming the company Facebook.
Why is it that as others (Google and Microsoft for example) adjust to a rapidly evolving technology, social landscape and even compliance landscape and Meta continues to lag (regenerative AI) or mis read market readiness signals (the metaverse)? There are three lessons here in reading strong signals, paying attention to shifting landscapes and honestly common sense that have been issues.
Shifting landscapes and pattens of mis reading them
I had written, like many others, on the risks of crypto in 2019. The intoxicating idea had clear downsides to it as NFL players and national banks raced to create their own digital exchanges and currencies. It will happen, but it will continue to be boom and bust until it is stable as an idea. Why would Facebook enter something they have little to now knowledge with? That is a true statement of speculation and positioning.
Why would Facebook take such a heady risk when it was not needed. Google and Microsoft far more adeptly stood carefully on the sidelines and watched the landscape unfold. Is that because they are better organized to see and interpret signals, are they led by a more polished management team or have a better infrastructure to amplify signals to ignore noise, or all the above?
Innovating user experiences in a digital space
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Regenerative AI and how could Facebook have missed such a clear signal?
When it comes to regenerative AI how could Facebook with its hundreds of millions of daily users and billions of complex interactions miss the opportunity to automate and support each users’ needs on the platform? Imagine the power of, typing in, “write me something cool from the news today about Taylor Swift I can share.” Maybe this is a silly example, but the power of re generative AI in hands of hundreds of millions of users to almost be their own news channel would be near infinitely valuable.
We are going to live in a long period of constant change. We talked about this trend in 2017, in the Wall Street Journal best seller, The Digital Helix. Organizational leaderships ability to read, hunt and analyze signals, and then structure the right reactions is going be as important as the strategies they are responsible for marshalling for their employees, customers and stock holders (in that order).
Facebook needs to innovate in a responsible way. Not only has it disbanded it’s responsible innovation team in late 2022, but it feels they are not looking at the wider set of signals before they do something (Metaverse, flirting with crypto, etc.) or are they contemplating a horizon one, horizon two or horizon three view of the world. Success in the next ten years will come from the idea of staying in neutral with as growth mindset. Listen to this discussion with the late sports psychologist for Forbes Futures in Focus, Trevor Moawad. I hope somebody at Meta does.
Now faced with the name of Meta how does Mark Zuckerberg and their team get their mojo right going forward? The first rule is look for signals and stop trying to copy your competition. It’s easy to look at Facebook, I mean Meta, and pick holes but these are valuable lessons, nuances in some way that we are all vulnerable to with the hubris of success.
— to www.forbes.com
