Meta analysis Long term.Meta is the big bet made by Facebook to corner the market on digital devices hardware currently causing problems for their other business models. The whole effort is a data wolf in sheep's clothing and precisely why they will compete long term with a decentralized metaverse from one of the big web 3 players the sandbox, decentraland, and the other side among possible other competitors in web 3.
In short Facebook and its various platforms compete with digital content companies of various backgrounds for the 18-29-year-old audience.
They do so with various products such as Video, Messenger, Whatsapp, Groups, Search, Workplace, marketplace, etc.
These software services want to collect data to sell to advertisers to predict what an individual will want. This requires knowing more about a person than usually they know. The problem for Facebook (now Meta) is that they don't control the devices this data is generated on. Apple and Google do and they don't take kindly to a data leech on their business model. Since they control hardware decisions Meta is up a creek when decisions like IOS 14 allow you to turn off the data gathering. This is Metas' biggest problem and why oculus is so important.
Snapchat challenged Facebook with filters and private messages and expiring messages capturing marketing dollars so facebook built a clone, stories, and Instagram.
Tik Tok challenged Facebook on short video stories capturing marketing dollars so Facebook built a clone, reels.
The bet is that metaverse interactions through either VR or AR will be the big new thing after short-form video as the primary method of interaction on the internet. Meta wants to not just be ahead of their next competitor and out of cloning and catching up territory but fully into controlling the hardware that is used to interact with such systems.
Horizon is their metaverse world which one can access through either oculus or eventual AR equipment through their partnership with Luxottica.
This is the pivot to Meta and much like other tech stocks, it has been hammered by the early stages of the current recession. Meta has big hoops to get through such as onboarding a population of users who need new hardware, and their future is rocky due to the past relationships with data from Facebook.
The future will see Meta compete with the global decentralized blockchain web 3 metaverses for control of the digital twin infrastructure represented by NFTs controlled by self-sovereign identities or DAOs in a fully digital economy that directs resources of automated systems of production.
The problem for Meta, in the opinion of this author, is they only seem aware of the interaction part of the business model for profit. They want data to sell to other companies. Meta doesn't seem to grasp the macro implications for the profit motive of production that a Metaverse enables. astoundingly, they're thinking too small.
Centralized Corporations will be most challenged and supplanted by DAOs given enough time in a sufficiently decentralized metaverse. There is a possibility that a subset of DAOs enabled by quadratic voting can capture immensely profitable internet functions of the modern world. In time due to competition on price and thus profit margin, some DAOs will rise to multi-national levels. Some DAOs could become big enough and faceless enough to rend populations from their governments by challenging the interests of power. Government regulation of such DAOs will be difficult if neigh impossible, especially if profit margins of too big to fail entities are to be maintained. In such a world DAOs would hold the keys to data that participants in the DAO contribute. Some subset of such DAOs would for profit sell their data to advertisers in ways voted on by the DAO members. Precursors to this exist already such as Brave and their token BAT.
Corporations destabilize government decision-making for their gain in a system designed as their sandbox. This author suspects DAOs as a disrupting force, are a possibility among the larger outcomes of various crypto ecosystems and their synergies in the long term. An exponential change in adoption of crypto more broadly could have that scenario happen sooner rather than later. But on the scale of decades, it's a distinct possibility.
For Meta, the question is can you own anything in such a world and sell it to anyone else, including data, or are they just happy to make a profit for now before that transition occurs? Do they play whack-a-mole with crypto project models much like their other competitors Snap and TikTok?
Whatever happens it'll be fun to watch zuck and his bucks while we make alien memes for the next few decades at least. All the best, see you on the moon.
