Facebook spent billions on the metaverse and all they got was a new name

A postmortem, perhaps, of the metaverse, particularly as envisaged by Meta, by Nick Heer. A number of other big tech players also had visions of an all encompassing immersive, digital realm, but aside from sometimes considerable expenditure, not a whole lot came of it. From where we are now, several years later, the connection between the COVID pandemic, and Facebook’s announcement they were effectively going all-in on the metaverse, couldn’t be clearer. The world was in the midst of seemingly endless lockdowns, and stay at home mandates. The metaverse pitch was certainly persuasive. We couldn’t live in the real world, so how about instead a vast virtual domain? Who couldn’t help but be excited by the prospect? I went as far as setting-up a metaverse tag here, which tellingly, hasn’t been used in three years. But the world we find ourselves in, nearly five years later, couldn’t be much further removed from that of late 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of what was then…