Facebook founder seems to be following in the footsteps of Tesla’s guru
It seems to be a rite of passage that as technology billionaires get older, they spend more time chasing dreams they might have fantasised about as kids. There’s Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with their rockets, and now Mark Zuckerberg, aged 37, with his plans to build an alternate digital reality known as the metaverse.
I am sceptical about the metaverse, and not just because of Facebook’s negligence of user safety. History is littered with tech companies that, despite their roots in innovation, could not pivot to new platforms. Even Google’s restructuring as Alphabet has faltered in new territory, with some of the conglomerate’s “bets” mostly draining money, even in promising areas like pharmaceuticals. A project with Novartis to track diabetes through contact lenses was shut down in 2018, while a similar partnership with Sanofi fizzled in 2019. Six years on from seeking new directions, Alphabet still makes more than 80% of its revenue from advertising.
The company has struggled to turn innovative ideas into products in the past. Among the misfires: the much-hyped mobile platform Home, which closed in 2013, and Snapchat competitors Poke and Slingshot . Facebook also could not build a voice assistant for its video-calling device Portal , because its engineers grappled with confusing priorities, some of them told me in 2018.
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