It's actually kind of amazing that there's not any real consequence to making that bad call. It sucked up a lot of energy, lots of people tried to stake and early adopter position in the metaverse and it turns out everyone just didn't want that.

I think they could have made more money if they built games into facebook. At probably a fraction of the cost really.

Reminds me of Marks 'pivot to video' on facebook [0]

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...

I believe they tried to court game developers via Facebook platform at one point. I recall giving Civilization Network a shot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_World

> there's not any real consequence to making that bad call

There is: they've spent a fortune of their money on building it.

Is that a real consequence? Are Facebook shutting their doors? Is Mark Zuckerberg no longer wealthy?

Yes, of course. It's not the sort of consequence that would be meted out by a parent, but it's appropriate. Facebook is much the poorer for it, as is appropriate for them trying a new thing.

That is exactly how Microsoft became so dominant in personal computing starting in the 1990s. While it's true that Microsoft did some unethical things, they succeeded primarily because Novell, WordPerfect, Borland, and IBM all made huge strategic errors and essentially knocked themselves out of the game. They missed inflection points that transformed the entire industry. Microsoft's errors were all smaller, and easier to recover.