Meta's Developers Aren't Using Their Own Metaverse
And I have thoughts.
Hi! Okay so it has been a few weeks (and man do I have a backlog of ideas), but I’m back. And yes, with another rant about Meta. Is it because I’m interested in where the metaverse is headed? Or is it some old-fashioned schadenfreude over Mark Zuckerberg’s current predicament…
I plead the fifth. But here is a picture of legless avatars dancing at a Horizon Worlds nightclub.
I will say, the question of how to make users feel embodied in virtual spaces is certainly fascinating… a topic for another day.
A few days ago, The Verge reported that Meta employees aren’t using Horizon Worlds, the company’s flagship metaverse. The obvious subtext is that if the developers themselves aren’t excited, consumers are unlikely to go out of their way to explore Meta’s virtual world.
Vishal Shah, head of the company’s metaverse division, addressed the issue on an internal discussion board:
“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it.”
Meta employees, blink twice if you need help.
People fall in love with products that solve a clearly defined problem. Horizon Worlds, and the small-m metaverse more broadly, is a solution in search of a problem. Behold, an example of really poor product-market fit…
If you aren’t up on tech jargon, product-market fit is when the features and value proposition of a product closely align with the unmet needs of the target market.
Companies rarely, if ever, find product-market fit on the first go. It is achieved by listening to users and responding with product iterations.
For example, back in 2010 a company called Burbn was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Burbn was a location-based app that let users check in at different locations, plan future check-ins, and post photos of meetups. The app didn’t perform well, so the pair decided to analyze how users were engaging with the app. The location check-in feature was hardly used, but people were going crazy sharing photos. The team followed the data, focused on photo sharing, and Instagram as we know it today was born.
This example illustrates how finding product-market fit is crucial to the long term success of a product or company. But the Burbn-to-Instagram pivot in 2010 existed in a radically different landscape compared to that of Meta and Horizon Worlds today.
For starters, 2010 saw the early days of the shift to mobile-first computing. The iPad was just released, and the iPhone was only three years old. New mobile apps for anything you can imagine were launching on the app store. That year, Apple would pay out over $1 billion to developers through paid apps and in-app purchases. Coincidentally, Facebook executed the shift from desktop to mobile optimization around this time.
So when Burbn became Instagram and saw explosive growth, it was riding a strong and growing trend on proven, in-demand technology—the smartphone. The same cannot be said for Horizon Worlds and the small-m metaverse in 2022, where the technology is squarely in the rapid innovation and early adoption phase.
New York Times reporter Kash Hill recently spent 24 hours in the Horizon Worlds metaverse, and approximately two use cases emerged. The night owls, gamers, and “metapreneurs” could virtually hang out with each other at all hours of the day, and Vishal Shah could physically turn his head to face other employee avatars while on a VR work call. Kash had fun, at least. But unless we’re talking about video games, novelty and entertainment does not equal utility. The smartphone and the growth of the app store solved many problems, marked by the sudden availability of tools we use daily—email, web browsing, social media—on a device at our fingertips. The metaverse, on the other hand, lacks a compelling use case for pretty much everyone.
Timing is everything—the best products have a clear “why now?” Instagram coincided with the market saturation of the smartphone and the rise of mobile, Netflix benefited from streaming enabled by high-speed internet, the list goes on. Imagine if Meta was a new startup with Horizon Worlds as their only product—a very different picture that even Andreesen Horowitz would hesitate to fund.
The math goes something like: huge consumer pain point + solution + timing. The reality is most people don’t have a problem that the metaverse solves, and the tech lacks the required maturity by at least a decade. Zuckerberg should scale back investment in Horizon Worlds and focus on headsets where they lead the market with the Quest 2. If there is any area where Meta has proven they can innovate and be the market leader, it’s in metaverse hardware. Why are they trying to do everything?
But in other news, at least he gave you legs.
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Have thoughts? What is the “why now?” answer for the metaverse? Reply to this email or leave a comment!
Cheers,
Ryan