Facebook expecting to fight Apple for metaverse dominance
As the race to realize the metaverse kicks off, Mark Zuckerberg told employees that Meta would be competing directly with Apple when it comes to creating AR and VR platforms.
Credit: Facebook
In June, a Meta employee asked how Apple's absence from the Metaverse Standards Forum would influence Meta's ecosystem.
Zuckerberg told employees that Meta would be competing against Apple to determine "what direction the internet should go in," according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by The Verge.
Zuckerberg also believes that Apple will likely want to tightly control the experience because "they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience"
The position puts Apple diametrically opposed to Meta, which already allows side loading on its Quest headset. Zuckerberg calls this a "deep, philosophical competition about what direction the internet should go in."
He also notes that he's unsure whether an open or closed ecosystem would be better and that Apple's strategy may prove more beneficial than Meta's open ecosystem. However, he states that Meta's goal is to get its hardware into the hands of as many people as possible.
The goal is to get "a billion people into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade," providing the same revenue as Meta's current ad business. That number is about what Apple makes per customer on the App Store annually now.
While Apple has not officially announced any augmented or virtual reality hardware Apple CEO Tim Cook has expressed interest in augmented reality.
Apple has long been rumored to be developing several different AR and VR devices, including a high-end Apple VR visor that could focus on virtual reality and gaming. Apple is also thought to be working on a smaller and lighter "Apple Glass" wearable that could be a companion to an iPhone.
Read on AppleInsider
Credit: Facebook
In June, a Meta employee asked how Apple's absence from the Metaverse Standards Forum would influence Meta's ecosystem.
Zuckerberg told employees that Meta would be competing against Apple to determine "what direction the internet should go in," according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by The Verge.
Zuckerberg also believes that Apple will likely want to tightly control the experience because "they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience"
The position puts Apple diametrically opposed to Meta, which already allows side loading on its Quest headset. Zuckerberg calls this a "deep, philosophical competition about what direction the internet should go in."
He also notes that he's unsure whether an open or closed ecosystem would be better and that Apple's strategy may prove more beneficial than Meta's open ecosystem. However, he states that Meta's goal is to get its hardware into the hands of as many people as possible.
The goal is to get "a billion people into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade," providing the same revenue as Meta's current ad business. That number is about what Apple makes per customer on the App Store annually now.
While Apple has not officially announced any augmented or virtual reality hardware Apple CEO Tim Cook has expressed interest in augmented reality.
Apple has long been rumored to be developing several different AR and VR devices, including a high-end Apple VR visor that could focus on virtual reality and gaming. Apple is also thought to be working on a smaller and lighter "Apple Glass" wearable that could be a companion to an iPhone.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Not saying Apple will win this... but Facebook Meta are burning trust so fast they are isolating themselves away from people with money.
Classic Freudian Slip. Saying a deeper truth without intending to. Apple is about the customer experience, and as part of that protecting the customer. Meta is all about exploiting the customer as a resource, not protecting, not even giving a damn about what sort of an experience the customer is having. To Apple customers are partners. to Meta they are raw material. Gardeners vs loggers.
It's not whether Apple or Meta will win. Apple won't even be playing Meta's game.
Apple and Tim Cook are the adults here.
Not that I have any idea what the metaverse is. Just boys with their toys who want to play games all day? `
Mark doesn’t even know what the metaverse is yet. He just keeps pouring money into the concept, and repeating how important it is.
Apple and Tim Cook are more than willing to let this whole thing percolate for a while longer until his team of visionaries and architects reach a fairly clear consensus on what this metaverse thing really is as a value delivery platform and where it should be going if it's driven by intentional design rather than just a different format for doing the same old thing, i.e., shoving more ads in front of user's eyeballs and surveilling user's behaviors.
One of the things you never want to do when it comes to architectural and system design is to commit too early. A recurring theme behind Apple's biggest successes over the past 20 plus years is that when they "finally" jumped into a market, like personal music players, cellular telephones, tablet computers, smart watches, streaming entertainment, etc., they tended to do pretty damn well and subsequently realign much of the existing market around Apple's vision of what the market should be. Some pundits were inevitably put off by what they saw as Apple's laggardly pace than what the pundits expected, but so what. In fact, the "finally" part of what Apple does is to make sure they put enough emphasis of the "Aim" part of the Ready-Aim-Fire sequence.
Zuckerberg and some of the members of the Metaverse Standards Forum are obviously prepared to start firing away at what they perceive as the metaverse solution. They can aim later. That's understandable because some of them, like Meta/Facebook, are simply redirecting fire from one attack vector to another attack vector, while others are just hangers-on looking for a new sales channel to shove their hardware/software components and products into. Apple doesn't fit into either of these categories and isn't going to get suckered into an early commit on something they have not (publicly) fully come to terms with, at least not within the scope of how Apple delivers value to its customers.
This has nothing at all to do with an "us versus them" battle between Apple and the companies behind the metaverse standards body. This is just Apple being Apple and making sure they get the Aim part right before they pull the trigger.
I watched them openly scoff at concerns their users had over Cambridge Analytica. If you know anything about that affair, it is absolutely nothing to laugh at.
Utter contempt, folks. Do. Not. Trust. An. Y. Thing. Meta. Tells. You.
Oh and not for nothing... one of their contractors complained to me - once her FB client was out of the room and gone - how cheap AF the company is. Miserly cheap.
Mark Zuckerberg == Montgomery Burns, only in a tech biz in SV vs. a nuke plant in Springfield.
#fuckzuck