Content is King here. Do you have source material and do you have playback devices or software out in the world?

Google has both with YouTube, Chromecasts and Android phones and TVs. They’re one of the few power players that can unilaterally change up their codec and metadata suite, but only as far as YouTube goes.

So “do better” means getting enough content behind a tech stack and still delivering a satisfying experience to the customer. If they can meet or exceed what Dolby delivers, I think that would be great! Even if they only match Dolby, that’s still pretty good.

Ambisonics hardware was on sale in the late 1970s and early 80s, but few people at that time had multi-speaker setups, which meant that the companies making it went defunct.

Libre and gratis ambisonics encoding and decoding software has existed for more than a decade. It is the domain of enthusiasts rather than regular consumers.

Makes sense, and this is actually the first I've heard of ambisonics. From your description, it doesn't sound like the kind of thing there will ever be tons of content for, so not tons of demand either. But a small demo-scene-like thing can be neat too.

That's a good point.

If support for playing Ambisonics was added to (say) vlc, and easy-to-use conversion tools from Atmos to Ambisonics also existed, that'd probably go a long way to increasing it's adoption.

I think the most important figure of merit is sadly how much money it will make the people in charge of implementing it in consumer devices.