Tim Cook has been the latest CEO of a great technology company to question the metaverse. A concept on which Mark Zuckerberg has relied to launch his ambitious strategic commitment (Facebook name change included) and in the process try to leave behind the excesses of the social network in terms of privacy.
The boss of Apple believes that most people couldn’t even define the metaverse and neither do you spend long periods of time living inside it as Zuckerberg claims. And much less ‘end the Internet’ as we know it to become the next great communication platform at scale.
Marc Zuckerberg wants to become the “king of the metaverse” and maybe he will, but he can find enough according to Cook. «I always think it’s important for people to understand what something is.”Cook explains to the Dutch publication Bright, “Y i’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is«.
Cook also expressed skepticism that people want to spend long periods of time in virtual worlds: “Virtual reality is something you can really immerse yourself in. And that can be used conveniently, but I don’t think you want to live your whole life that way. VR is for set periods, but it’s not the best way to communicate.”.
Cook’s comments make him the latest high-profile CEO in express skepticism about the metaverse. Snap’s CEO has already indicated that the company avoids using the term because it is “quite ambiguous and hypothetical” and that if you asked a room of people to describe it all their definitions would be “totally different”. The same was explained by the head of Amazon devices: “if you asked a few hundred people what they thought the metaverse was, you would get 205 different answers”.
The Metaverse thing is very green
Really there is no common definition from a term first used in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. A science fiction title that became the best-selling cyberpunk novel of the nineties and that, in addition to a lot of referential elements to the genre, did not avoid the mathematical and scientific concepts around new technologies and included the mention of the term avatar as an image of a person on the Internet.
In the novel, the metaverse is a shared virtual space using virtual reality, augmented reality, avatars, and the Internet. The idea proposed by Zuckerberg goes that way, although with certain differences and approach. It is not the first time that it has been attempted and we have already seen it in Second Life, a social network launched in June 2003 as a virtual world with open programming. After a great initial pull, the use of Second Life was reduced to a minimum, but surely the concept of it did not go unnoticed for the development of new virtual worlds that claim to be ‘revolutionary’.
It is not easy to know if Tim Cook’s statements are intended to ‘stop’ the impact of Meta or does he really mean what he says, that the metaverse will not be so bad. From Intel they have already come out to relax the hype indicating that to develop the virtual worlds described by Zuckerberg we would need to multiply the current computing power by a thousand.
We will have to wait. Apple has spent years pouring vast sums of cash into tech and talent into augmented reality technologies (including the acquisition of PrimeSense, the firm that developed the sensor technology for Microsoft Kinect) and it’s only a matter of time before it ships its own hardware.
What do you think? Will the metaverse be the great revolution that Zuckerberg promises? Or will it end up being a fiasco like virtual reality has been until now?
