![]() ![]() ![]() Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January 2023, laid off the 100 members of its “industrial metaverse team,” and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team. The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. In an obituary published on Insider, Ed Zitron suggests the ultimate cause of death was the arrival of yet another next big thing: The metaverse was a term in search of a trend a trope in search of instantiation a failed act of summoning by leaders who really thought they could control the weather. ![]() Legless avatars beckoned us into barren digital landscapes to … stand around and talk about NFTs? Parcels of “property” sold for millions of dollars? It was a … virtual world? No? A mixed-reality game? No? A new frontier? An escape from meatspace? A layer on top of it? Companies raised and spent billions of dollars on the metaverse without ever quite getting their stories straight about what it was supposed to be or do - they didn’t just lack a good pitch beyond “getting in early,” they lacked a coherent concept to pitch in the first place. A few years on, Silicon Valley’s brief obsession with the metaverse has assumed the quality of a bad dream, half-remembered. ![]()
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