The Real Metaverse
I’m scrolling through quarterly earnings calls from Meta, Apple, Gartner reports, earnings projections. The numbers are real. The faith is touching. The outcome is entirely predictable to anyone who paid attention twenty years ago.
Then a headline catches: “Apple Vision Pro shifts focus from metaverse to spatial computing.” Which is a delicate way of saying nobody’s buying the dream, so we’re pivoting to something that sounds new while meaning the same old thing—a better computer.
“Eight hundred billion by 2030,” I say aloud to no one. “That’s the projection. Meta’s Reality Labs has spent over a hundred billion and still can’t make money. They’re just… burning shareholder patience waiting for the payoff.”
I keep scrolling. Roblox. Fortnite. Decentraland. Pockets of immersive experience with no coherent business model, watched by Gen Z users who will happily spend hours there but refuse to pay for it in ways that matter. The moment you monetize engagement without hiding it, the users vanish. Engagement without revenue is just a hobby wearing a venture-capital suit.
“Browser wars all over again,” I mutter. Users can’t move their digital clothing, their NFTs, their avatars between platforms. AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy promised seamless interoperability in 1995. They lied. Nothing changed. We’re reliving it with skins and virtual real estate, calling it innovation.
Meta’s pivoting to AI-powered avatars now. Not because they got smarter. Because the original bet died and they need to announce success before shareholders notice. AI avatars are just avatar systems. Mixed reality is just regular computing with a camera. But the names sound like progress.
I realize I’m building a theory about tech discourse—how it mistakes novelty for progress, how it dresses up failure in new language and calls it strategy. And nobody notices because everyone’s too busy buying tickets to the next mirage.
Then I find myself deep in a developer forum, buried under product documentation and technical specs. A post from someone building enterprise VR training software. Distributed manufacturing company. Workers in different countries, learning the same procedure in a shared space. No avatars. No social fluff. Just data and bodies and the 40% reduction in onboarding time that everyone else missed while hunting for the Metaverse with a capital M.
This is the real metaverse.
And it will never be a metaverse. It will just be training software. Useful. Boring. Profitable in a normal way. It won’t make headlines. No $800 billion market forecast. No cultural transformation. No Vision Pro adoption announcement.
Everyone funding the fantasy is actually funding this—but they have no idea, and they’d be horrified to know it. They want to build worlds. What they’re actually enabling is corporate training optimization. And the fact that that’s the only part of their grand vision that actually works? That’s the joke nobody gets.