Microsoft and Meta Launch Tech Giants’ Metaverse Competition
Metaverse, first named by Neal Stephenson in his book Snowcrash, has been on the lips of the technology and investment world more than ever in recent weeks. For many, the concept has come to the fore for the first time. Metaverse is a virtual world that can be immersed through VR or AR glasses or a monitor.
There is no complete description of the concept of Metaverse, but it promises to merge our physical world with the digital world. The merger involves wealth, socialization, productivity, shopping and entertainment. In metaverse, each participant is represented by an avatar and digital products can be in NFT format, for example.
In metaverse, an individual can actually live another life behind his or her avatar without anyone knowing the individual’s true identity.
The purists hopes for a fully decentralized Metaverse built on blockchains, but now centralized parties like Meta and Microsoft have announced their intention to create a metaverse. The commercial value of Metaverse is huge, so it’s no surprise that the biggest technology companies want to put their spoons in the soup.
Meta even went so far as to change its name from Facebook to Meta.
Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that the market value of the metaverse is expected to be $800 billion in 2024. Whether or not this market value will indeed be reached is of course not certain as this is still a relatively new business area with changing use cases.
Meta
At the end of October, social media giant Facebook announced that it was branding itself as a Metaverse company called Meta (full name: Meta Platforms, Inc.). Its stock is currently trading under the ticker MVRS. Microsoft hinted at its Metaverse intentions back in the early part of the year, but Meta gave gas to its plans with complete dedication to the Metaverse concept.
Like other tech giants, Meta's share has risen sharply over the past five years.
According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the name change reflects the company’s ambitious plans to be a leading gambler in the field of metaverse. Zuckerberg believes the metaverse is the next step in the development of the Internet.
The CEO has been considering changing the company name since the company bought Instagram in 2012 and Whatsapp in 2014, but finally decided this year to make the change a reality. They also acquired Oculus, a manufacturer of VR glasses, in 2014.
As the company called Meta, they made its first acquisition by acquiring Within, the company behind the VR fitness app Supernatural. The virtual fitness applications have surprised Zuckerberg with their popularity.
Meta’s investment in building a metaverse is estimated to be at least $10 billion this year alone. However, Zuckerberg said he does not expect to profit from the investment in the near future.
Meta's goal is to unify the company's social media, Oculus Quest glasses, Portal and future devices accounts into a single entity.
Zuckerberg said of his vision for Metaverse:
- “Our next platform will be even more immersive - the internet, where you’re part of the experience, and not just watching it. We call it metaverse and it will touch every product we build.
- The most important factor in a metaverse will be the feeling of being involved - just as if you were there with a certain person or in a certain place.
- At Metaverse, you can do just about anything you can imagine - hang out with family and friends, work, play, shop, create - as well as have new experiences that don’t fit our thoughts on computers and phones today.
- In the described future, you can teleport yourself immediately as a hologram to the office without a business trip, to a concert with your friends, or to your parents’ living room for a chat.
- Your television, your complete office space with multiple monitors, your board game, and the like will be holograms designed by creative people instead of physical objects.
- You will switch between these experiences on different devices. With AR glasses, you stay in the physical world, with VR glasses, you get a holistic virtual experience, and with the help of computers and phones, you can get to metaverse from current platforms.”
Over the next ten years, Zuckerberg hopes the metaverse will reach a billion users mark, serve hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and support the work of millions of creative people and developers.
The CEO also understands his company's responsibility to create a metaverse:
- “Metaverse will not be created by a single company. Our role is to accelerate the development of the underlying technologies, social platforms and creative tools to make metaverse a reality.
- Building products that people love is not enough. Privacy and security should be built into the metaverse right from the start. Likewise with open standards and interoperability. This means not only supporting existing technologies - crypts and NFTs - but also a new way of governing.”
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Microsoft
Microsoft hinted at its interest in metaverse from the beginning of the year. In fact, Microsoft is a pioneer in metaverse.
The company's recent years have been very favorable for the share price.
At the BUILD conference earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the enterprise meta verse, which consists of digital twins, simulated environments and mixed reality. “With Metaverse, the whole world will become your application base,” Nadella opened up his plans for the future.
According to the CEO, the idea of the metaverse is to integrate the real world into the digital world and the interaction takes place through avatars. In addition to 2D avatars, they can be immersive 3D avatars.
Metaverse is, in all its strangeness, a collection of different technologies. The technologies that will be integrated into the concept include the rapidly developing artificial intelligence and the “Internet of Things”, as well as the cryptocurrencies and VR that are just beginning of their journey. Together, they create an alternative economy, similar to the current one, but with avatars instead of people.
Microsoft has been an early adapter for virtual reality. Its Xbox game platform already includes many in-game metaverses that move players to a new place and time every time they are turned on.
In 2016, the company also launched its HoloLens, a mixed reality experiment. The experiment has since received new updates.
Microsoft workforce products for companies like Teams have seen a sharp rise in sales during the pandemic as virtual appointments have become part of everyday life. A change in the enterprise metaverse could potentially be a natural transition for Microsoft.
With Meta just announcing its intentions, thanks to the popularity of the Xbox, Microsoft is already making a profit with the Metaverse theme.
Microsoft's uses for metaverse are more meta with a business focus. The company reports profitable results quarterly for its remote work products.
The company provided an overview of the future with the launch of Microsoft Mesh for its HoloLens product. It allows teams in different geographical locations to collaborate with the help of avatars.
Microsoft's metaverse uses a wide range of applications, from gaming platforms to remote work, productivity applications and entertainment experiences through its VR platform.
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Risks
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