Zuckerberg's metachovers: the commitment to escape Facebook messes - Magazine like this - Opinion Bolivia

When Mark Zuckerberg appeared in Connect, the Facebook virtual conference held the previous week, smiling while walking through impeccable rooms full of modern furniture in the middle of the century, looked like a man without pressure.

Informant?Which informant?An old crisis of trust that has furious regulators, employees fleeing and legislators comparing Facebook with large tobacco companies?Nothing of that.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg and his lieutenants cheerfully exposed their vision for the so -called "metaverso", the immersive virtual environment that Facebook - a company that was called a goal although all, except some very committed financial journalists, we will probably continue to call it Facebook - is trying to try build up.

Like most Facebook strategy ads, brand change formalized a plan that has been underway for years.The company already has more than 10.000 people working on augmented and virtual reality projects in their reality Labs division, approximately twice as many people that all Twitter staff, and plans to hire 10.000 more in Europe.Earl this week, the company announced that this year it will spend about 10.000 million dollars in investments related to metaverso, and has been acquiring emerging virtual reality companies in a kind of land grabbing in metovers..

What is metaverso?

There are several questions that one could ask about this strategy.The first and most basic is: What is a metaverso and how will one see the Facebook version of one?

That question was answered, at least partially, in the presentation of Connect.Zuckerberg painted a metaverso image as a clean and well -lit virtual world, which in principle will be entered with augmented virtual reality devices, and then more advanced body sensors can be incorporated so that people can play games, attend concerts, goPurchasing, collecting art, hang out with the avatars of others and attend work meetings, all this virtually.

This vision of an immersive digital kingdom is not new, it was outlined almost 30 years ago by science fiction author Neal Stephenson, but Zuckerberg bets on the future of Facebook with the idea that it will become real, and says that metachos will be a"Mobile Internet Successor".

Another obvious question that can be done is: "Will this work?".Of course, but it is impossible to ensure that Facebook - a company characterized by a great bureaucracy whose greatest advances in the last decade have produced mainly with the purchase of competition applications or copying their characteristics, instead of developing their own ideas - will createan immersive digital universe in which people will really want to spend time.

Perhaps the most interesting question is: why is Zuckerberg doing this?After all, it is not the prelude to a huge corporate reorganization or a sign of an executive director who wants to facilitate his work, as was the case when Google was renamed as Alphabet, in 2015, and Larry Page delegated the control of daily affairsto LASTAR PICHAI.And although some have speculated that brand change is intended to distract the attention of the most recent Facebook scandals, it is strange to think that announcing a radical plan to reinvent the digital world would make critics less skeptical about the reasons for the company.

What are the reasons?

To understand why Zuckerberg goes with everything, it is useful to understand that a successful metovers could help sol.

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The first is a well known one: the main business of Facebook's social networks is aging, and younger users are abandoning their applications for Tiktok, Snapchat and other more current alternatives.The Facebook youth problem has not yet affected it financially, but advertising income is a lagThe twenty -year -old.

The most grim version of what Facebook could become the coming years, if current trends are maintained - a lodazal dominated by mature people and full of videos of animals and political issues - it is clearly not the kind of things that the company wants asYour star product.(Zuckerberg supported a strategy focused on young people recently and said that the company's new approach was attracting and retaining younger users).

Metaverso could help with the company's demographic crisis, if you get young people to use their oculus viewer devices and spend time in Horizon, Facebook's virtual social network, instead of watching Tiktok videos on their phones.

Another problem that the metoverso strategy could address, if it works, is the risk of the platform.For years, Zuckerberg has expressed his discomfort because Facebook mobile applications are executed in iOS and Android, which makes their success largely depend on Apple and Google, two companies whose priorities are usually diametrically opposed to their own. Los cambios de este año en la “transparencia de seguimiento de aplicaciones” de Apple, por ejemplo, afectaron al negocio de publicidad de Facebook al dificultar la recopilación de datos sobre la actividad móvil de los usuarios.And if smartphones remain the dominant way in which people interact online, Facebook will never control their destination.

Since 2015, Zuckerberg has talked about the strategic benefits of metoverso when he wrote to his collaborators that they should "succeed in the construction of an important platform and key applications to improve our strategic position on the next platform".

A metaverso strategy, if it works, is that it could end the dependency that Facebook has of Apple and Google, by directing users to their platforms, such as Oculus, where you do not have to worry about being expelled from the application store to spy on theuser activity or facilitate illegal domestic trafficking.That would mean that if, for example, Facebook would like.Zuckerberg indirectly criticized Apple and Google, saying that his control of the mobile application ecosystem was "suffocating innovation, preventing people from building new things and slowing the entire internet economy".

The third problem faced is the regulatory risk.The company is not in danger, but regulators are making so much noise to restrict their growth (by implementing new privacy laws or by preventing the next Instagram from acquiring, for example) that makes sense to make bets in other areas, such as virtual realityand augmented, which is less likely to regulate in the short term.In addition, as many of Facebook's regulatory problems are derived from the way in which their applications for the conflicting political debate are used, metachos could allow it to venture into a friendlier and more gentle social universe that has not yet been co -opted by politicians.

The fourth problem, of course, is the damage that Facebook's reputation has suffered for its frequent errors and scandals over time.For years, everything that does, even projects that have nothing to do with social networks, such as launching a cryptocurrency wallet, have been affected.And as dozens of media still analyze their internal investigations, it is likely that the public image of the company gets worse before improving.

Zuckerberg, whose new public personality is something like a “futuristic one who is above all”, says that the name change was not motivated by the desire to escape those scandals.But the Facebook brand has had real consequences.Has demoralized the company's workforce and makes it difficult to attract and retain talented employees.He has sunk associations, generates nervousness in advertisers and turned Zuckerberg - who, despite his manifest ambivalence, wants to be remembered as a visionary technologist instead of being seen as a destroyer of democracy - into a world villain.

Building metovers will not solve any of these problems overnight.In fact, it will probably not solve them and could cause Facebook to be subjected to new scrutinies that I would not have faced if it had simply focused during the next few years to solve the problems of its current products.

But it would be a mistake to rule out metaverso as a simple marketing trick or a strategic tactic aimed at increasing the influence of the company on its rivals (although it has a bit of both things).If it works, Zuckerberg's metavers would mark the beginning of a new era of dominance, one that would extend the influence of Facebook to new forms of culture, communication and commerce.And if not, it will be remembered as a desperate and expensive attempt to give a futuristic touch to a geriatric social network, while the attention of urgent social problems is diverted.

However, this is not a vanity trick for Zuckerberg.In metovers, he has found a kind of escape route: a way of fleeing the messy and turbulent present of Facebook and occupying a new and immaculate border.It is not surprising that he looks so happy.