What if Zuckerberg is right?

Facebook is now Meta. This is inspired by the metaverse. That seems to be the flavour of the season with Silicon Valley and even the Marvel Cinematic Universe branching out into a multiverse.

Metaverse is a concept from a 1992 sci-fi book. Said a Tweet…

NARRATOR

He was. https://t.co/U4XnXCmeeG

— jack (@jack) October 20, 2021

I don’t know if you’ve seen the ad for that featuring Mark Zuckerberg himself. One commentator said that it looked like the next episode of the popular dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror. Generally, Zuckerberg has received great ridicule for this move and many even called it a diversion from all the bad press he has been getting from the latest whistle-blower chronicles. A distraction from data privacy issues, politics and the effects of Facebook and Instagram on children.

But the Metaverse of Zuckerberg’s imagination is a shared virtual universe with many 3D virtual spaces. What if the future is indeed Meta? The world of VR-MR-AR is called XR or Extended Reality. What if tomorrow XR headsets become commonplace? You wear an XR monocle or glasses when you go out. You have an XR cubicle at home or maybe the term is not Smart Home but XR home. What if this virtual world indeed does take care of your socializing, collaboration, office, entertainment, and everything else. What if it’s an XR globe? Then a social media like Meta that had predicted it would be a hot property.

Zuckerberg founded Facebook, then acquired Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR and many other companies, nearing 100. It was but natural that he would want to call it something else. Meta seems to fit the bill. The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) was renamed International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. Google was founded in 1998 and became Alphabet in 2015. Now Facebook, which was founded in 2004, is Meta in 2021.

Contrary to the bad press, Zuckerberg is on a roll. Facebook is targeting 3 billion users and WhatsApp is touching 2 billion. Both Instagram and Facebook Messengers are already in the 1 billion users club. That’s the world’s 4/5 largest social platforms. (The fifth member is YouTube) Meta’s market capitalization has touched $1 trillion. While Zuckerberg failed to monetize properly for years, the company is finally targeting an annual revenue of $100 billion.

Zuckerberg may yet have the last laugh.