I don’t scoff at Nadella’s invocation of the enterprise metaverse; sure, Microsoft has the HoloLens, but that is just one way to access a work environment that exists somewhere beyond any one device or any one app. It is a hybrid approach.
Microsoft’s metaverse (graphic courtesy of Microsoft)
4 November 2021 (Paris, France) – A common reaction to the past week of tech news among pessimists has been that the metaverse is (1) years away from becoming a reality; and (2) simply a term promoted by Meta to distract us from a bunch of bad things the company did back when it was still called Facebook. So it may have come as a surprise on Tuesday when Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, took to the virtual stage at his company’s developer conference to announce:
As I noted earlier this week, Satya Nadella’s great triumph as CEO of Microsoft was breaking Windows hold over the company, freeing the company to not just emphasize Azure’s general purpose cloud offerings, but to also build a new OS centered on Teams that was Internet-centric, and device agnostic. Indeed, that is why I don’t scoff at Nadella’s invocation of the enterprise metaverse; sure, Microsoft has the HoloLens, but that is just one way to access a work environment that exists somewhere beyond any one device or any one app. It is a hybrid approach.
There is a lot of imprecise terminology when talking about the metaverse, so it’s worth defining it sharply. To that end, I think of the metaverse as the next generation of internet-powered services, which are likely to be experienced primarily in new hardware for virtual reality (headsets) and augmented reality (glasses) that are still in their infancy. The overall is goal to create an enhanced sense of presence that removes geographical barriers to social interaction, including for work.
Meta (the old Facebook. Remember?) makes most of its money selling ads on social networks, and Microsoft makes most of its money selling productivity software and infrastructure tools to businesses. Given those differences, it was remarkable to watch Nadella presentation and note how many similarities Microsoft’s vision has to Meta’s.
Both companies envision the metaverse as a place where work happens, for example. Both are pushing animated, oddly legless avatars. Both are building virtual whiteboards and other places where workers can collaborate over long distances. And both are building hardware to enable this — Meta with Quest, Microsoft with HoloLens.
Perhaps more importantly than any of that, Meta and Microsoft are building these technologies for the same reason: there is a growing consensus that the next generation of platforms will be hosted on AR and VR hardware, and both companies are determined to win the market for both.
If Meta has an advantage, it’s a track record in building social experiences that billions of people use daily. (Its early success in selling VR headsets has given the company additional confidence.) Microsoft’s advantage lies in the fact that for a huge swath of the workforce, Microsoft’s products are where work happens. There’s a world in which most people choose not to buy a VR headset until their boss sends them one as part of a post-COVID shift to remote work. For these folks, Microsoft’s version of the metaverse could well end up being the default starting point.
For that reason, I was interested to read about the latest from Mesh, the company’s new-ish product for creating the feeling of presence across devices, from PCs to VR headsets. For starters, Mesh is coming to Teams, Microsoft’s work chat app. Here’s Tom Warren at The Verge:
Microsoft Teams will get new 3D avatars in a push toward a metaverse environment, and you won’t need to put a VR headset on to use them. These avatars can represent you both in 2D and 3D meetings, so you can choose to have an animated version of yourself if you’re not feeling like turning your webcam on.
Microsoft will use AI to listen to your voice and then animate your avatar. If you switch to a more immersive 3D meeting, then these animations will also include raising your avatar’s hands when you hit the raise hand option or animate emoji around your avatar.
Will these animated avatars singlehandedly usher in a bold new era of work? No. But it seems notable that two of the biggest companies in the world are now building such systems. And in Microsoft’s case, the product will be available here in the first half of 2022. Amid all the complaints that these presentations are serving us vaporware, some of this software already has scheduled due dates.
That said: both companies’ visions really are years away from being realized. There remain plenty of hard technological problems to solve (I outlined those problems here), and consumer (and enterprise) demand will need to be stoked with something other than a developer conference keynote. Sometimes the tech industry collectively agrees that something will be the next big thing, and the market shrugs: chatbots and 3DTVs come to mind. It’s still possible that the metaverse could fall into that abyss.
But recently I spotted a Twitter thread that gave me a different perspective. Shaan Puri, the investor last seen eerily predicting the entire future of Clubhouse, popped up this week to suggest that the metaverse is not a place, but a time: specifically, the point when our digital selves and lives come to feel more important to us than our physical bodies and surroundings. Puri writes:
Soon, some company will make smart glasses that sit in front of our eyes all day. We will go from 50% attention on screens to ~90%+. That’s the moment in time when the metaverse starts. Because at that moment, our virtual life will become more important than our real life.
I might quibble with the idea that this is about whether digital life is more “important,” since that term is so loaded. But a world in which 90 percent of our lives are spent interfacing with digital surfaces would represent a kind of singularity — a further break with our geographical surroundings, and one likely to have profound consequences.
Should that moment come, it would represent the culmination of a process that began with the arrival of television, continued with desktop computers and has currently plateaued with smartphones. Along the way, Puri notes in his thread, more and more of life has become digital. More work is now remote; more friends are now made in online communities; more people play video games than play all sports combined.
Puri’s insight is powerful because it places the metaverse in the context of a trend that has already been unfolding for decades now. If you’re still ambivalent about its prospects, it’s worth asking whether you think people have maxed out their available screen time on the phone, or whether they would consume more of if they could.
As someone who regularly finds himself looking at his phone while walking down a flight of stairs, crossing the street, and other activities in which I might die from checking my Twitter notifications, I think humanity still has a few hours of the day to go.
It’s now clear that Microsoft thinks so, too.