It was December 2022, and Meta (META -1.38%) had already invested a staggering US$100bln in metaverse research and development. However, one could see that the market was not as enthusiastic as the founder of Facebook and Meta’s leadership team.
Reports suggest that not only the market outside Meta but also people who were part of Meta failed to understand the vision of Metaverse. Survey numbers indicated that as large a segment as 42% of Meta’s employees could not understand the company’s Metaverse vision.
In 2022, Meta had to lay off 11,000 people, equalling 13% of its workforce. Meta’s Metaverse division, Reality Labs, had lost US$3.7 billion three months before. Comments on the lay-offs in an anonymous employee survey were particularly bleak about Meta’s Metaverse outlook. There were comments like “the metaverse will be our slow death” and “Mark Zuckerberg will single-handedly kill a company with the metaverse.”
There were reasons why Metaverse could not take off the way it was expected. Unlike the 2D, screen-based internet, the Metaverse is a 3D virtual space accessed by either a VR headset or AR (augmented reality) glasses, which superimpose a layer of digital information on top of the visible world. However, to many, this was a cumbersome way of working.
The pandemic prompted people to adopt virtual and remote working styles. However, once the pandemic was over, people preferred meeting face to face or, at most, to have a simple video call rather than wearing a clunky VR headset and dragging their legless avatars into virtual meeting rooms.
The leisure applications of these VR headsets also fell short of what was expected of them. While Meta’s VR headsets were the market leader, buyers were not interested in delving deeper and exploring the principal application working behind it: Horizon Worlds.
Meta described its Horizon Worlds application as “a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds.” Meta had set a target of 500,000 Horizon World users by 2022, but the figure it could hit by the end of 2022 was only 200,000. It was 100,000 fewer than the February 2022 figure of 300,000, indicating that many first-time users did not retain it.
Feedback highlighted many factors responsible for the non-performance of the Horizon App. It was criticized for programming bugs, instability, rudimentary graphics, and not being exciting enough to retain user attention. Users and reviewers also found the graphics basic, often garish and textureless.
However, the inadequacy of the highly ambitious Meta, or its apparent failure to reach its potential, did not signify a failure for the technology. According to numbers published by Statista and endorsed by the World Economic Forum, even under the most conservative scenario, the total addressable metaverse market could reach US$1.91 trillion by 2030, while under the moderate and optimistic scenario, it could reach US$3.17 trillion and US$4.44 trillion respectively.
The failure of one provider or product line is often followed up by the success of an alternative, which tweaks the path a little bit, makes necessary corrections, and shows the way forward. Apple’s (AAPL -0.13%) Vision Pro, for instance, leaned heavily into AR rather than a fully immersive metaverse, perhaps indicating the direction the industry could head to.
The Apple Vision Pro has ushered in the spatial computing era by seamlessly blending digital content with the user’s physical space. Users can work, watch, relive memories, and connect in ways that were previously not possible. They can expand their movies, shows, and games to the perfect size and experience them in spatial audio.
The Apple Immersive Video puts the viewer in the center of the action with high-end immersion and more pixels than a 4K TV for each eye. For work purposes, Apple Vision Pro allows to seamlessly bring in the user’s Mac workflows using Mac Virtual Display. Users can connect a Magic Keyboard, a Magic Trackpad, and other Bluetooth accessories to expand the ways to navigate. With SharePlay in FaceTime, one can collaborate with colleagues using apps together in real-time.
While the future of Metaverse still looks exciting, with the possibility of becoming more efficiently useful in new shapes and forms, several technologies came with a lot of hope, excitement, and potential and failed to live up to expectations. Yet, their failures were not the end of the road. They were supplanted by new technologies. In the coming segments, we will discuss a few such technologies that fell short and the ones that eventually supplanted them.
Google Stadia (2019 – 2023)
Google launched Stadia with much fanfare. However, just three years after its launch, Google decided to shut down its big bet on cloud gaming and decided to stop operating from January 18, 2023 onwards.
Google, a part of Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL -1.87%), had gone to great lengths to brand Stadia as the “future of gaming.” But despite its efforts to build hype, experts believed, the company always lacked one key element: video games.
The company failed to release any original titles for Stadia and relied on third-party games to draw in players, causing the cost to shoot up. The company reportedly approached companies like Peloton and Bungie about white-label deals for its streaming tech. This dependence on third-party providers led to high latency, weak game selection, and – eventually – poor consumer adoption.
While Stadia could not achieve what it had set out to, Microsoft (MSFT -1.51%) Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) and NVIDIA (NVDA -2.13%) GeForce came up with more flexible, better-integrated cloud gaming services that could continue to expand in quality and availability.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX-powered cloud gaming, also available on VR headsets, is known for its higher resolutions, faster frame rates, real-time ray tracing with RTX on, speedy access to GFN servers, extended game session lengths, and maxed-out game settings.
NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA -2.13%)
Most recently, Nvidia reported revenue for the third quarter ended October 27, 2024, of $35.1 billion, up 17% from the previous quarter and up 94% from a year ago.
Segway (2001 – 2020)
Ninebot introduced Segway scooters amidst the global scooters-sharing craze. In 2018 alone, the company sold 1 million scooters. In contrast, it took the company first 16 years to sell 100,000 Segway PTs. The leap was phenomenal, to say the least.
One can find Ninebot’s scooters in more than 100 cities, from the Americas to Asia, Europe, and Australia. However, things didn’t quite work out the way they should have. Analysts pointed towards two significant drawbacks.
First, its cost was high—US$4,950. Secondly, as reports suggest, ‘it was hard to look like anything other than a nerd riding one.’ Segway struggled to reduce the price of the PT to a consumer-friendly $1,000, as the cost of its nickel metal hydride battery made that impossible. However, the fizzling out of Segway did not signal the death of the e-transportation industry or e-scooters. Modern, affordable, and widely adopted alternatives for urban transport with improved battery tech and autonomous capabilities filled the vacuum.
LG Energy Solutions, for instance, is a company that has championed the production of low-cost batteries. Last year, the company was in talks with three Chinese suppliers about manufacturing low-cost electric vehicle batteries for Europe.
France’s Renault said it would include lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery technology in its plans to mass produce EVs, choosing LGES and its Chinese rival CATL as partners to build a supply chain in Europe.
For 2024, the company reported KRW 25.6 trillion in consolidated revenue and KRW 575.4 billion in operating profit, a year-on-year decrease of 24.1 percent and 73.4 percent, respectively. The operating profit margin was 2.2 percent, including the IRA tax credit effect.
“Last year, we actively responded to EV demand in North America,” said Chang Sil Lee, CFO of LG Energy Solution.
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3D TVs (2010 – Mid-2010s)
3D TVs came in with much hype. They were positioned as the future of home entertainment that could bring a cinema-like 3D experience to the users’ living rooms. However, what was thought to be the strength of 3D TVs turned out to be its ultimate weakness.
Manufacturers did not get the point that watching cinema in 3D in a theatre was not the same as watching 3D television, as convenience is the key to making home entertainment products successful. Many home 3D TVs used the active shutter system, which required a pair of glasses that rapidly opened and closed in sync to produce the 3D image. It is these glasses, which need charging, that make 3D Television cumbersome in the home.
When asked about the decline of 3D TVs, James Cameron, the man most popular for making highly-acclaimed 3D cinema, said:
“Not everybody is a film geek like I am where you sit down, you put the glasses on by yourself, and you just watch a whole movie which is more what the theatrical experience is. So, it kind of got out of step.”
He also stressed the aspect of watching and consuming Television when he said that “people experience 3D in a movie theatre very differently than they do in a home. They don’t want anything that distracts them from multi-tasking and/or socializing with other people that are in the room with them and so on.”
However, the nosediving of demand for 3D Television did not mean that people were not keen to have a high-quality TV viewing experience. The gap was filled by 4K, OLED, and MicroLED TVs with improved resolution, color, and HDR advancements. Gradually, they became the dominant focus for premium home entertainment.
Samsung is the leader in manufacturing displays. It manufactures LED solutions for a range of industries, including lighting, automotive, display & mobile, and more. Among its display and mobile LEDs, there are solutions like Edge Display LED, Direct Display LED, and Mobile Flash LED.
The edge lighting technology implements fewer LEDs, allowing advanced design with economic benefits. It helps enable slimmer displays while realizing greater efficiency. Top view, side view, and bendable type modules satisfy various market demands at competitive prices with thinner displays.
For 2024, Samsung reported a consolidated revenue of KRW300.9 T, significantly better than the previous year’s US$258.9 T.
Apple Newton (1993 – 1998)
Apple Newton is often remembered as a prophetic failure that paved the way for future innovations. In short, it was positioned as a revolutionary personal digital assistant (PDA) with advanced handwriting recognition. However, when seen its journey in retrospect, it is believed that high cost, poor handwriting recognition, and limited consumer interest made it a flop.
Delving deeper, tech industry experts and analysts also realized that setting up its supply chain was cumbersome as it was extremely difficult to get component manufacturers to build any sort of custom parts. That meant everything on the PC board had to be at right angles–which meant getting the right fit was a challenge.
The team was trying to pull off a design referred to as “the Batman concept” – a dark, sleek, and sculpted aesthetic. However, the team was not satisfied with their designs. According to Gavin Ivester, who ran Newton’s industrial design:
“We joked about sneaking into Sculley’s house and sewing bigger pockets into everything.”
John Sculley was Apple’s CEO at that time. However, Newton’s aspirations did not go in vain, as – many believe – it paved the way for the idea of mobile computing, replacing PDAs with intuitive touchscreen smartphones and tablets, the legendary iPhones and iPads.
The number of Apple iPhone unit sales dramatically increased between 2007 and 2023. Indeed, in 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced, Apple shipped around 1.4 million smartphones. And by 2023, this number reached over 231 million units.
In the first quarter of Apple’s financial year 2025, iPad sales generated about 11.75 billion U.S. dollars in revenue, up from 7.02 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter of 2024.
On January 30, 2025, Apple announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 first quarter ended December 28, 2024. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $2.40, up 10 percent year over year.
HD DVD (2006 – 2008)
HD DVDs were successful for a brief period. They came into the entertainment scene as the next-generation home video format. Yet, they lost the ground to Blu-Ray.
In 2013, Blu-ray was termed the next-generation optical disc format for high-definition video and high-density data storage. Although the form factor was similar to that of the drive and media was identical to the CD/DVD formats, in comparison with the DVD format, the Blu-ray disc had 5 times higher density per recording layer. Blu-ray also succeeded as it had wider industry support.
In 2013, Blu-ray was supported by about 200 of the world’s leading consumer electronics, personal computers, recording media, video games, and music companies. The format also had support from all Hollywood studios and countless smaller studios as a successor to today’s DVD format.
However, Blu-ray also phased out with the rise of high-quality streaming services like Netflix (NFLX -1.09%) and Disney+.
Netflix, Inc. (NFLX -1.09%)
On January 22, Netflix stock jumped nearly 15 percent following the company’s Q4 earnings report a day prior, delivering substantial growth and profitability that exceeded expectations. The company reported a 15.6% increase in revenue, rising from $33.72 billion in 2023 to $39 billion in 2024, and a significant boost in operating profit from $6.95 billion to $10.42 billion, a 49.9% year-over-year increase.
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion in revenue in the fiscal year 2023. Disney+ Core generated an average revenue per user of $7.28, while Disney+ Hotstar generated an average of $0.7 in Q2 of fiscal year 2024.
Google Glass (2013 – 2015, Enterprise Edition lasted longer)
Finally, we look into one of the most talked-about technologies that sputtered and died untimely. It was Google Glass that appeared in the market as a marker of the mainstream augmented reality paradigm, finally drawing upon us and replacing smartphones and smart glasses.
But, as we look into its evolution, it could not come out from the shortcomings of privacy concerns, high price, and a lack of practical applications. On March 15, 2023, Google issued an official statement to the public that it would no longer sell them.
However, the path that Google Glass opened up was for many inventive, cutting-edge innovations to follow. Augmented Reality tech continued to evolve in AR devices like Apple’s Vision Pro – one that we’ve already discussed – Microsoft’s HoloLens and an enterprise-focused Magic Leap.
One of the most exciting innovations to appear in recent times – however – has been Meta Ray Ban smart glasses. These glasses come with an HD Camera to capture high-quality photos and record videos for up to 3 minutes with an ultra-wide 12MP camera and five-mic system, a capture button for high-quality photos and videos, discreet speakers to deliver an immersive audio surround sound experience, open-ear speakers, and much more.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (META -1.38%)
Above all, it has the backing of Meta, a company that earned US$164 billion in 2024, a 22% increase compared to 2023.
Altogether, technological innovation never goes in vain. One particular technology may die an untimely death. But it opens up a thousand doors for future technologies to thrive on their remains.
Click here for a list of top technologies to invest in with scary potential.