It took a decade from the first smartphones until iPhone/Android like devices with a mostly uniform appearance and UI had decisively won, though. There was a lot of rapid exploration of design space first.
As for VR/metaverse, there's been constant exploration of this space for decades. The VR boom in the 90s was killed by cost and primitive hardware, but we still have surviving persistent 3d worlds that came out of that wave.
We've also seen a lot of non-VR exploration. Aside from Minecraft, we have Roblox, which while a lot more limited in some ways is also a lot more meta: you have an identity that persists across worlds, with a social layer across that. Minecraft looks to be slowly moving in that direction.
We'll see people exploring a lot of other variants, and most will fail. But in the process we'll start to learn what will work.
I doubt Facebook, or Minecraft/Microsoft, or Apple, or Google will turn out to be the winner though.
Maybe they'll manage to buy the winner.
To quote (some) of Larry Ellisons famous statements about it:
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion."
"Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
The point of "the cloud" was the concept of users not needing to think where their device is communicating. The device might as well be talking to "the cloud" in the sky.
The point of "the cloud" was the occlusion to the end user.
I don't see much value in the phrase as it doesn't help me know what is going on in any way.
When smartphones were launched there was a simple description - "oh cool, it's a traditional phone but it has a computer running inside of it? makes sense"