That said, if possible suspend your disbelief that a company will get a headset technology, personal connectivity and even the ability to use it in-person to a level of quality that you will be able to experience it and your real world beer at the same time. ![]() Facebook’s awful presentation of this technology says more about about the level of desperation that drove Zuckerburg to rebrand his company than it does about the tech. The experience of a “metaverse” or “VR” as it has been portrayed so far is no better depiction of where where computer interaction is going than moving sidewalks at the 1864 world’s fair were of the future of transportation. Describing what the company was doing as “spying” does not paint a dark enough picture of what the company was and continues to do with personal information. Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.įacebook/Meta has got it coming, no doubt. Click on the beer and iced-tea mug to find out how: And if enough people think that way, it would be a bummer for Meta.Įnjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? You can donate. In this case, Within Unlimited would get in the way of Meta’s hoped-for total domination of the metaverse, which I’m too boneheaded and old-fashioned to even comprehend, because I like to drink an actual beer not a virtual beer, and be with actual friends not avatars, real life in all its grittiness being precious to me, and not replaceable by a headset, Meta’s software, and avatars representing anonymous people with headsets on.Īctual reality is just fine with me, and the virtual reality of the metaverse has no value to me, not even virtual value, and I don’t understand why it would have any value to anyone else. Then there’s the slowing ad business in general at the moment, and likely going forward, and Meta makes most of its revenues from ads.Īnd there’s a bunch of other stuff, including all kinds of legal stuff, such as getting sued by the Federal Trade Commission this week over Meta’s acquisition of virtual-reality company Within Unlimited, with which Meta is trying to do what Big Tech always does, namely to buy any potential or actual competition that gets in the way of total domination. Then there’s Apple’s “Ask app not to track” prompt on iPhones, which cut into the ability of Meta to spy on iPhone users, and therefore it cuts into Meta’s revenues in a big way. But it just took Facebook, I mean Meta, till September before it started the descent.Īnd there are a host of additional reasons why the shares should have plunged, and did plunge, including the first revenue decline as a public company a spike in expenses a 35% plunge in net income and the dubious future of Facebook – I mean, is anyone other than boomers still using it? Well not everything, because I had already been at the time documenting Imploded Stocks since earlier in 2021. But hey, this was the pandemic, the Fed was printing money hand over fist, the Fed’s interest rates were near 0% even as inflation had begun to rage, and nothing mattered, everything shot higher. ![]() ![]() There are a host of reasons for Meta’s plunge, including that the shares should have never shot up in this crazy manner in the first place. Easy come, easy go (data via YCharts):ĭespite the summer rally, the Nasdaq composite is still down 23.6% from the peak in November, and lots of stocks slid, skidded, and plunged, and this re-arranged the deck a little among the top 11, but left the top four in the same position. Those who bought in 2021, OK, win some, lose some.Īnd this dump in market cap caused something else to happen over the past two days: While other stocks surged, Meta fell out of the top 10 most valuable companies in the US, into 11th place, behind Visa (data via YCharts):īack in September 2021, Meta, with a market cap of $1.077 trillion, was the fifth most valuable stock by market cap in the US. ![]() This is no biggie obviously because people who bought the shares at the IPO for $38, and thereby participated in the biggest tech IPO in US history at the time, still made 318% at today’s price, and the shares could fall another 50%, and they’d still make a ton of money.
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