Two days before Mark Zuckerberg announced the Facebook name change, he sat down with Ben Thompson of Stratechery. There has been a lot written about Facebook’s name change but we thought this was particularly interesting to hear the inside view of the metaverse from Zuckerberg himself. This is a transcript of that interview.
What is clear from the outset of the interview is that there are still fundamental questions to be answered about what the metaverse is – and Zuckerberg wants to be on the forefront of answering them. Will this be a peer-to-peer network, will it be one company’s centralised platform, will it be multiple companies operating multiple platforms, if it is multiple platforms will they be interoperable or walled gardens. These are some of the questions that need to be answered as the metaverse is realised. And the way these questions are answered today will have effects for decade to come.
Somewhat reassuring is Zuckerberg’s philosophy that the metaverse should be organised around people rather than apps. If you think about the mobile internet, everything is built around apps. It means each app operates independently, we need to create different accounts for each app, and it is rare that you can move your data or your identity from one app to another (the slight exception here is Facebook). In this interview, Zuckerberg suggests that the metaverse should be designed around people, so we can have one digital identity that can be carried across apps and platforms.
To give you an idea of where Zuckerberg thinks the technology will go, this quote really sums it up. “By the end of this decade or even by the middle of the decade, I would guess that we’re going to reach a point where our VR devices will start to be clearly better for almost every use case than our laptops and computers are.” If he is right about the trajectory of VR and AR technology, then this pivot to the metaverse was a no brainer. He has bet the future of his company on this vision. Now we get to watch and see if he was right.
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