Why the Metaverse Failed — josh.earth
Why the Metaverse Failed
June 28th, 2026<br>I recently read the excellent long form<br>article The Metaverse Fever Dream<br>by Pixel Envy (Nick Heer). It gets the general vibe right and I encourage you<br>to<br>read it, but I also think it doesn’t capture what the metaverse — meaning Mark<br>Zuckerberg’s vision strong enough to rename the company after — really was.<br>His vision wasn’t to bring the world together in immersive nirvana. It wasn’t<br>even to sell more ads. The Metaverse existed to let Facebook own a<br>hardware platform.<br>Just to state this upfront, I refuse to call Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta. It<br>will always be Facebook, no matter how many coats of paint you slap on it.<br>The Dawn of Smartphones<br>Let’s go back to 2005 . The height of mobile technology is RIM’s Blackberry<br>and Palm’s Treo smartphones. Cell networks are getting better and Microsoft is<br>threatening to turn Windows CE into something people would use without being<br>forced to by their employer. And all the while rumors are swirling about the<br>iPod of phones that Apple is cooking up. In walks Google .<br>Google’s dominance in search is becoming a certainty but their senior management<br>has found an existential risk: fundamentally Google is a website . Someone<br>could eventually make a better search engine. Even worse, the owners of the<br>operating systems control who the default search engine is. Google can pay for<br>that privilege (which they do), but they know it could be taken away at any<br>moment. They could always be intermediated by the platform owner.<br>If you are Google in 2005 you know the only way to never be cut out is to own<br>the platform the end customers use to get to you. So they formulate plans to<br>replace every platform that could hold them back. The web browser is a platform,<br>so they start planning their own web browser (Chrome). The desktop operating<br>system is a platform, so they start planning ChromeOS. Then they look<br>further afield.<br>The future is clearly mobile, and if Windows Mobile owns most of the market like<br>MS Windows does on the desktop, they could be cut out as well. The solution:<br>buy your own mobile operating system and get it everywhere before the<br>competition reacts . And it worked. Android is eventually on more than 2/3rds<br>of the worlds phones and Google is on almost all of those. Paying off Apple<br>takes care of the rest. World Domination Accomplished. Well done, let’s knock<br>off early.<br>Cut to a few years later. You are Mark Zuckerberg. You want an empire like the<br>big guys. Your little social website is doing pretty well so you burn cash<br>trying to build or buy any possible threat. You retool your website to become<br>mobile first. You buy What’s App to dominate messaging. You buy Instagram to<br>dominate photo sharing. The problem is: you still don’t have your own hardware<br>platform. You could be banned from the App Store at any minute. That’s an<br>existential threat. What can you do?
Facebook Makes Hardware<br>Facebook made a phone. Sure it was<br>just reskinned Android and manufactured by HTC,<br>but everyone called it "The Facebook Phone" . It came<br>with Facebook Home, a UI layer<br>that let you Facebook your Facebook without even starting Facebook. Sadly for<br>Mark, it was a flop. It turns<br>out smartphones are a rich man’s game<br>and even Facebook wasn’t rich enough to win it.<br>Mark is a pretty determined guy, so he invests in the<br>Portal, their attempt to put video<br>calling on tablets and TVs. (I forget if they changed their name to Meta by the<br>time this shipped). I actually liked the Portal TV device; with some UI work and<br>an open platform I think it would have been successful, but it simply didn’t do<br>enough to earn its keep on HDMI 1.<br>Clearly hardware is hard so you need to buy your way<br>in. Facebook bought Oculus,<br>makers of the wildly successful Kickstarter backed VR headset, focused on making<br>VR cheaper and more immersive thanks to the advent of cheap smartphone sensors.<br>For a while they let Oculus run as a separate (but very well funded) group, but<br>eventually it was sucked into the mothership. I actually interviewed to join<br>the Oculus group a few weeks before the great sucking. Dodged a bullet.<br>Facebook now has a successful hardware platform where they control the entire<br>stack. While it was built on top of Android instead of building from scratch.<br>(Thank you, John Carmack),<br>the Quest had its own shell and its own<br>browser (no Chrome here!). They<br>were in charge of their own destiny. Smooth sailing, right? Time to unify the<br>disparate parts into a 100% Facebook virtual experience that you can’t get out<br>of: Facebook Horizon
VR was dying before COVID<br>Let’s get to one of the big points of the article I started this rant with, that<br>if VR couldn’t be popular during a global lockdown when everyone had lots of<br>free time and was trapped inside, then it would never be popular. While that<br>might be true for Horizon, it is not true about VR in general. Truthfully VR<br>was dying before COVID. I know because I was there.<br>I worked in Mozilla’s Mixed...