I also don't think the metaverse was doomed to fail from the start -- still not sure if it's doomed now. Based on John Carmack's resignation & letter about how hard it was to get anything done, it sounds like there are some serious cultural or bureaucratic issues getting in the way of progress though
Such sad tales, companies that only make billions of dollars a quarter, with a solid chance of continuing to do so for the rest of our lives...
This obsession with growth is deeply unhealthy. "Innovation" can be great, and we certainly need it happening somewhere, but the idea that it's something that any given company needs to be doing or it will die is preposterous, particularly when applied to an established industry giant like Facebook.
At some point, I think society is going to have to admit that companies have a lifecycle, and that sometimes a company should die, maybe long before it runs out of money. If the only outcomes are "grow forever" and "become IBM", then I think we should prefer the IBM route, because at least that provides value.
Leave the innovation to smaller companies and allow them to thrive or die on their merits. This whole thing where fossils long past their innovative prime are able to control the entire industry, through boondoggles that are kept afloat indefinitely through trillion dollar cash reserves, rent seeking activities, and strategic acquisitions, is just not good for anyone except the people who are able to exit.
You want innovation, get FAANG out of the way.
publicly traded company. they have to keep that quarterly income up, and on a long enough timeline that means taking whatever revenue you can. if you don't your executives keep getting sacked until they find ones who will do the job.
it's not a question of if they'd do shady stuff but when.
or else they pull a Microsoft and start expanding into wildly unrelated fields like the Zune (which failed) or the XBox (which is huge).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Not to mention that Facebook was a perfectly fine and popular social networking platform until Facebook itself poisoned it with the engagement algos that put politics and fake news on top, and drove people away.
All of Meta's current issues were self inflicted.