What critics missed in Zuckerberg’s Meta keynote? A perfect Lightning Strike.

I'm currently looking out the window of a plane 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. I fly a lot, and yet the view from up above never ceases to amaze me. With the right music in your headphones I find the vastness is perfect to just... think.

Which brings me to a few thoughts I have about Mark Zuckerberg's recent keynote in which he announced the rebranding of his company to Meta, and focused everyone's attention on what he called the metaverse.

A lot has been written about the metaverse, what it is, what it isn't, what it might be, and mostly how people feel about the uncertainty and newness of it all (spoiler alert: most feel uncomfortable in some way).

A perfect Lightning Strike

I'm not going to add to that part of the conversation today. What is much more interesting is something that aligns closely with our work here at Forward Momentum: Zuckerberg's near-perfect execution of a Lightning Strike, or the public announcement and staking of your claim in a new category. This is critical in the world of Category Design, a discipline focused on the mindful creation and development of new market categories.

Now, you may think that Meta merely adopted the term "metaverse," much in the way it was described in the 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans interact via avatars in a 3D virtual space that resembles the real world. But I see a lot more here.

Zuckerberg presented his company’s vision for a virtual space in which you can socialize, work and play. Your avatar can reflect your personality and you can interact with others who are not physically near you. Technologists might consider this merely a very complete articulation or logical next step of what the inventors of the internet itself and science fiction work such as the movie Avatar or even Star Trek already envisioned. Or an evolution of existing games such as Roblox or Second Life. That may all well be true.

Articulating a complete vision

But from a business and societal perspective, Zuckerberg did what no one else had, up to this point: He pulled this all together and laid it out in one coherent vision. Importantly, he was the right person for the job — it had to be someone with the means and power to actually push this vision forward. Meta has been building some portions of what he described for the past few years, and you can experience it today. And you won't be surprised to hear that the Chinese companies Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have been heavily invested in this area, as well. Meta's Oculus VR headsets and similar hardware are simply early iterations of how users will ultimately interact with each other. Meanwhile, 5G networks are not just faster data pipes but also deliver computing power at the edge of the network, which will be helpful once you're wearing a lightweight (and probably underpowered) pair of AR glasses in public.

Remember when the release of the iPhone made everyone rebuild existing things but "on mobile?"
It's safe to say we'll see a lot of activity of the same kind "in metaverse."

True, the translation of existing paradigms into a new environment or onto a new technology in and of itself is boring — or at least not headline material — even if it might produce revenue, which is necessary to fund true R&D. Only when artists, technologists and crazy thinkers begin to imagine and even push the possibilities of a new technology do we get truly transformational work. That’s when it gets exciting!

Transformational change requires a wide landscape of actors

Transformational work takes time. It also takes trials and failures. So it's necessary to make as many people as possible think about this before it fully exists. That’s where the perfectly executed Lightning Strike comes into play. I believe Zuckerberg when he says he doesn't want to build the metaverse but for the metaverse.

The ecosystem of many players who can all offer their visions, their additions to the metaverse, and crucially, price their products and services independently is what will make this a real market category with a striving landscape of actors. Nike, for example, just acquired a company that makes virtual shoes for the metaverse.

By devoting almost their entire annual keynote to this topic, and by devoting significant resources to artist's renderings, example implementations, visualizations of what such a metaverse might look and feel like, they made it tangible (no pun intended). They gave people something to react to. To project their own thoughts onto, to think “hell, no!” or "yes, that!” or “yes, but with a few tweaks."

Even the doubters and haters are providing a very relevant part to the global discourse. 

In other words: everyone's talking about it. And when you talk about the metaverse, you immediately think about Meta, the company.

That's a perfectly executed Lightning Strike, right there.