Just a few months ago, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, was still so convinced that the Metaverse would be the next step for the Internet that the very idea justified the countless billions of dollars the company had already invested in it, and promised to spend even more in the future.
But since then, the current situation might be quite different. In a long and comprehensive article published in The Information, Meta seemingly has completely abandoned the term "Metaverse" when presenting collaborations to potential partners. Among other things, it states:
"Meta is no longer talking about the metaverse in conversations with its advertisers, instead trying to get them to support its TikTok-like short videos and AI tools. This is in stark contrast to last year, when one out of every two words out of their mouths Zuckerberg's idea was 'metaverse', in what he hoped would be the future of the Internet."
This is also in stark contrast to the close to $4.3 billion spent on Reality Labs in the last quarter alone, and that the Metaverse was also the reason they changed their name to Meta.
