Welcome to The Yellow Summarin - collecting the most interesting ideas, topics, and tweets from the past week at the intersection of tech, media, and commerce.
In today's edition (24.10.2021), I cover Facebook’s focus on winning the Metaverse and the bullish signs that tell us it may actually succeed.
Read and listen:
Metabook
No, this is not a new type of tool for book discovery. It’s also not the name of the latest NFT craze. What “Metabook” stands for is just one of the suggestions the internet ran wild with this week after the news that Facebook is going to announce a rebrand and a new name shortly. The move, as speculated by sources, is to align the identity of the brand with its dedication to the metaverse and will serve as a way to show how serious the company is about its intention to become one of the dominant players in this new digital world.
The rebranding also aims to achieve the goal of distancing Facebook from its shaky and not always favorable (to say the least) public perception. Recent leaks and revelations about the company has provided a flurry of negative news titles about the company. Issues of trust and ethics have been in the public’s mind for a long time when it comes to Facebook and its platforms, but recently, the onslaught of negative stories has made these problems even more obvious to the world.
With all that said, I still believe that Facebook is going to become an even bigger and more powerful company over the next five to ten years. It is just too hard to ignore the impact of having Mark Zuckerberg at the helm of the business. Say what you want about him, but in my view, he has always been acutely aware of the direction the winds are blowing in and has made killer moves that resulted in today’s dominance. Just think about the acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. Every one of these have empowered the company to stay relevant and dominate various media and consumer categories.
Consumer Friendly Tech
Looking through the prism of the current narratives around digital reality and metaverses, the acquisition of Oculus in 2014 is the one that is super interesting.
Oculus develops technology for virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences - both hardware and software. These include, headsets, apps, games and research which according to the company’s website is dedicated to create great virtual, augmented and mixed-reality experiences for the consumer that launch in five to ten years.
The ability to develop consumer-friendly applications and devices is the key to any technology becoming mainstream. In order to cross the chasm from the early adopters of tech geeks and enthusiasts to the mainstream consumer, the technology must have low barriers to entry and a proven track record of solving real, every-day problems. Oculus is doing just that. To this day, the Oculus Quest 2 is considered the best overall VR headset - its ease of use, wire free design and affordable price of under $300 has positioned it as the most popular VR headset.
In addition, access to a big consumer base is a must-have in order to ensure the successful penetration on the market. Facebook, with roughly 2.9 billion users worldwide, has the perfect foundation on which its ambitions for the metaverse can grow. Therefore, it won’t surprise me if in a few years Facebook becomes the dominant metaverse company Mark Zuckerberg envisions it to be.
Determination
Perhaps the most bullish signs about a successful execution of becoming a metaverse company are the comments from Facebook’s founder. According to Zuck, the future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences. The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision, he said in a remote address to employees. “What I think is most interesting is how these themes will come together into a bigger idea,” Zuckerberg said. “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.”
Read more:
To further its commitment to the world of VR, AR and MR, Facebook recently announced an executive change for the chief technology officer role in 2022. Andrew “Boz” Bosworth has been at Facebook from 2006 and has been influential in developing the News Feed, the company’s advertising products, and has been credited with the successful revamp of Facebook’s hardware division and efforts into VR known as Reality Labs. Since taking over hardware, Facebook has had a series of well-received launches, including the Oculus Quest 2, Facebook Portal, a pair of AR glasses in partnership with Ray-Ban, and the Horizon Workrooms - a remote collaboration platform.
Read more:
Meet Facebook’s new tech chief Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (Fortune)
Mark Zuckerberg just brought his trusted fix-it-man to the forefront at Facebook (CNBC)
Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR: report (The Verge)
In Search of Talent
In order to achieve the lofty goals set by MZ and his new CTO, the company will need a lot of human capital. Talent eager to work on building the Facebook metaverse may not be easy to find within existing ranks inside the company. Already a fifth of its employees are working on experiences around VR and AR. To find the manpower needed to bring Zuck’s vision to reality, Facebook has decided to turn to Europe. The continent is full of highly-skilled engineers, eager to work on new technologies, who cannot find opportunities of this scale inside the continent. Limited access to funding, strict regulatory frameworks, and bureaucracy have been some of the barriers entrepreneurs experience when building companies. Thanks to its scale, Facebook can offer a fruitful playground for eager engineers and enthusiasts based in Europe where they can work on large-scale impactful projects.
And the company just announced such a move - it will hire 10 000 people in Europe to work on projects around the metaverse in the next five years. This is a strategic move that will achieve two very important goals. One, it will help Facebook in leveraging the know-how of highly-skilled talent across the continent. Second, it shows the company’s intention to play nice with the European Union and regulators. Creating highly-skilled jobs of this scale is going to be a boost for policy maker’s promises as well as a stimulating shot for local economies. It is no surprise that the official announcement, posted on Facebook’s newsroom, is from Nick Clegg - the former deputy prime minister of the UK and current VP of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook.
Read more:
Investing in European Talent to Help Build the Metaverse (Facebook)
The Great Rebrand
This brings us to the rumored announcement of this week that Facebook will shortly unveil a new identity that aligns more closely with the company’s efforts into the metaverse. It comes at a time when the company’s brand can do with a little refresh that can serve as a change of narrative after a series of negative news circulated the media.
A rebranding has impact on both internal culture and external perception. Such a move serves as a sign to employees and stakeholders of the determination towards a new mission and vision. It stands as the pillar that supports all internal efforts and helps guide teams into a unified direction. It ensures strategies are devised and executed coherently and with the right focus. Focus is a key word here. Without it, the chance of success are much smaller. Furthermore, a lack of focus can make it harder to retain and attract talent because it can make it unclear to people what goal they are working towards.
To outsiders, a rebranding tells the story of where the company is going. It also tries to change perceptions about it. For those who follow the news around Facebook, this may not achieve much but for the larger public, who are not so involved in the media stream surrounding the company, it can create a distance between the Facebook of old and this “new” company which is going to dedicate its efforts to building virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences that captivate people’s attention and imaginations.
Scale + Determination = Winning
I cannot help but feel bullish about the future of Facebook. The company’s platforms are accessed by billions of users around the world on a regular basis. This control of attention and direct access to people’s minds offers the most fruitful playground for Facebook to explore what a metaverse can be. Combine this with the company’s ability to moves fast (and sometimes break things) and you have a powerful machine that can define the category of VR, AR and MR for the entire industry.
To top it all off, the belief and determination of Mark Zuckerberg adds that extra oomph necessary to ensure a very serious attempt at achieving the lofty goal of becoming a metaverse company.
If Facebook executes successfully its vision, our lives are going to look very different in five to ten years with culture, media and commerce omnipresent across the real world and a digital metaverse of many shapes and forms.
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P.S. I think a cool candidate for the new name can be “Verse”.
That’s all for this week.
Have a great week(end)!
Marin