Meta, formerly Facebook, is steering away from the “metaverse.” Chalk it up to another win for the almighty customer.
The company renamed itself in 2021 and then spent $80 billion trying to get the metaverse to catch on. It never did, and Meta has announced it will no longer add new apps to its flagship product in the virtual reality world. That’s an acceptance of defeat.
Much is made of the power of major American technology firms, and they are powerful in many ways. But at the end of the day, they are only as strong as their billons of customers allow them to be.
From the very beginning, many thought the metaverse idea was weird. People made fun of the animated worlds Meta thought they would enjoy. The company tried to popularize it anyway but never attracted enough users to make the product worthwhile. It’s far from the first time big tech companies have failed.
Google, now Alphabet, failed to make Google+ into the major social network it wanted. That followed Google Buzz, another aborted attempt at a social network.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone couldn’t compete with the iPhone or Android. Before that, the company couldn’t get enough people to buy the Zune, its answer to the iPod. It launched the digital assistant Cortana in 2014, then shut it down after nine years of trying — and failing — to get people to use it.
Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos, has struggled to expand into brick-and-mortar retail. It shut down its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go grocery stores earlier this year. Previous bookstore and clothing store efforts failed as well. Whole Foods, the most successful push into brick-and-mortar, came through acquisition.
Countless other examples illustrate the simple truth that consumers are sovereign in America, and if corporations fail to satisfy them, no matter how successful they might be in other ways, they will be punished with losses.
Fortunately for taxpayers, Meta was losing money that investors voluntarily gave it. Their bet didn’t pan out, and that’s on them.
When tax dollars are involved in trying to predict future business trends, however, there’s little accountability for failure. Investors and corporations sometimes make bad investments, but politicians reliably do so, with money that doesn’t belong to them in the first place. And government is the one monopoly that never goes away.
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