Zucks’ Metaverse App Reflects How He never Learns from Past Mistakes

Zucks' Metaverse App is on 'Quality Lockdown' as even employees are not ready to use it

Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg found himself being memed online not too long ago after he shared a picture of his digital avatar as Zuckerberg on metaverse. Meta was one of the first tech companies to go all in on the Metaverse. The concept of the Metaverse itself was somewhat made popular by Meta. The Metaverse was supposed to be the next phase of Facebook, the social media platform's evolution. Unfortunately, it seems that Meta has squandered the opportunity of cashing in on Metaverse. Evidently, Meta's Metaverse app is so bad, that it has to force its employees to use it. Now an internal memo, acquired by online publication The Verge, has found that people working on Zuck's metaverse app rarely use the platform. The Horizon Worlds team has been placed in "quality lockdown" for the rest of the year.

In a number of leaked memos that are being attributed to Vishal Shah, Meta's lead for Metaverse operations states that employees at Meta aren't using the new App and the VR system to log into Horizon Worlds. A September 15 Memo reads: "For many of us, we don't spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly…Why is that? Why don't we love the product we've built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don't love it, how can we expect our users to love it?"

Another memo from Shah, just 15 days later, dated September 30 reads:

"Employees still aren't using Horizon enough…hold managers accountable for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can't do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds and also the public build so you can interact with our community."

To Mark Zuckerberg, the idea of the metaverse app and the importance it will have in the future are essential for the growth of the company. In July, Meta reported having lost $2.8 billion as a result of the lackluster performance of its metaverse division, Reality Labs. Shah also believes that this concept is strong and has significance.

The Metaverse market has been growing really high as there is a considerable rate of penetration of users for many such applications as content creation, gaming, learning, social interaction, training, and virtual shopping. In 2021, Facebook has announced it to invest US$10 Billion in building the metaverse and changed the company's name to Meta. The metaverse app would allow users to communicate with friends, families, or colleagues using their digital avatars. Experts have anticipated that the metaverse will penetrate many market spaces and industries as there will be a build-up of industries in the future. The revenue will be increasing incessantly. Meta was the first to take the initiative but nowadays, experts think that Meta will ruin the metaverse for everyone.

Zuckerberg on Metaverse says it wants to help fix misinformation running rampant across the internet — a problem it may have helped create in the first place. Facebook parent Meta announced a new AI-powered tool on Monday, called Sphere. It's intended to help detect and address misinformation, or "fake news", on the internet. Meta claims that it's "the first [AI] model capable of automatically scanning hundreds of thousands of citations at once to check whether they truly support the corresponding claims." The metaverse is looking less and less exciting all the time with brands hosting bizarre events nobody wants to attend, but the slew of companies bringing VR realities to life certainly isn't failing for a lack of trying. In fact, employees at Facebook say founder and company head Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed.

"[It's] the only thing Mark wants to talk about," an anonymous former director-level employee told Business Insider in a report published in April 2022. According to the report, Zuckerberg is focused solely on metaverse content creation but says the project will take a decade or more to complete, likely requiring improvements to the Oculus Quest 2, also called Meta Quest 2 since Facebook purchased Oculus and later changed its name. Despite the project's scope, Zuckerberg isn't giving employees a clear strategy, but he still wants to inform every department company-wide about the pivot to focusing on the metaverse.