Phil Spencer’s Hot Take on the Metaverse is Perfect (Premium)

Phil Spencer is exactly what Big Tech needs more of, a truthful, plain-spoken everyman who’s not a savant or a megalomaniac, but is just about always right.

I was going to write a longer piece about Spencer, who has impressed me at literally every turn during his ascension to the upper executive ranks at Microsoft. But time is short, and I don’t want to lose sight of the concise commentary he just made about Meta’s nonsense push to a “metaverse” that in no way resembles the metaverse that author Neal Stephenson created in Snow Crash in 1992.

So let’s start there.

Meta---or, the artist formerly known as Facebook---is a company I almost refuse to write about because Mark Zuckerberg is a fraud who stole this company from its real inventors and then transformed it into an engine of hatred that divides people and usurps national elections. Unfortunately, Meta and its three big services---Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp---each have over 2 billion users and they are thus impossible to ignore. But it’s not enough. And in recent years, Zuckerberg has pivoted his horrible company for a future called the metaverse, which is really just an evolution of virtual reality (VR).

Meta’s metaverse push has impressed almost no one, though I will sheepishly admit that I actually like the look of the apps Microsoft showed off at Meta’s recent conference. This very week, Meta announced its latest quarterly results, which I did not write up---see above, re: refusal---and it was a bloodbath. Shares in the firm dropped 25 percent after Zuck revealed that revenues were dropping and expenses were growing because of his insane focus on building his version of a metaverse. For those who disdain Zuckerberg and Meta, news that its crucial ad business---the only way it makes money---is teetering was met with cheers.

Before any of that happened, Stephenson had published his most recent novel and found himself getting questions about Big Tech’s new Big Thing, the metaverse. As reported in Wired, he became frustrated and then outraged by what he learned about those efforts. And he decided to ignore Meta’s work and simply create a single metaverse that would ignore the platform wars that have dominated each generation of personal computing---Windows vs. Mac, iPhone vs. Android, and so on---and be a singular, open thing like the Internet. An open metaverse, not a walled garden.

Whether he succeeds or not is sort of beside the point, though it is perhaps pertinent that most of you have probably never heard of this effort or the company, Lamina1, that he created to make it happen. (I certainly hadn’t.) But I wanted to frame how the inventor of the metaverse feels about Meta because it’s comforting to see the disdain he has for it.

And it’s also comforting to see the disdain that Phil Spencer has for it as well.

"If I think about videogames, for years we've been putting people together in 3D spaces to go and save the world fro...