The social network's CEO told employees in an internal meeting last month that Meta is competing with Apple over the future of technology and the metaverse
It's no secret Meta and Apple have been competing for years, with the rivalry increasing in recent years over privacy and different approaches to user tracking Both companies are taking different approaches to the "metaverse" and augmented reality. Meta has begun its journey into the "metaverse," revealing its vision for the future of the internet and releasing accompanying virtual reality headsets, but Apple has yet to enter the space.
Apple is about to launch its first augmented and virtual reality headset early next year. It's pretty clear that Apple is going to be a competitor for us, that's what Mark said when he responded to a question from an employee. The competition will go beyond simply offering the best hardware and will also play out "philosophically" according to the founder of Facebook.
I think it's pretty clear that Apple is going to be a competitor for us, not just as a product but philosophically. We're approaching this in an open way and trying to build a more open ecosystem. We're trying to make more stuff interoperable with Android. We're trying to develop the metaverse in a way where you can bring your virtual goods from one world to another. We created the Metaverse Open Standards Group with a bunch of other folks that you just mentioned, and Apple didn't join.
In the June 30 meeting, he claimed that this is a competition of ideas. He said that Apple believes in doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that. Meta sees the need for a largerecosystem.
It's not clear whether an open system from Meta or an open system from Apple would be better for the metaverse.
One of the things I think is interesting is that it's not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better. If you look back to PCs, Windows was clearly the one that had a lot more scale and became the default and norm that people used. And Mac did fine, but I think PC and Windows were, I think, the premier ecosystem in that environment.
On mobile, I would say it's more the other way. There's more Android devices than there are iOS devices, but I think in developed countries and places like the US or Western Europe in kind of the high end, [and] a lot of the culture-setters and developers, I do think that skews quite a bit more towards iPhone and iOS. So I'd say on mobile, Apple has really carved out quite a good position for themselves, and that's why they're the most valuable company in the world, or maybe one of the couple most valuable companies in the world.
Meta's north star should be whether it will be able to get over a billion people into the metaverse, shop and spend hundreds of dollars in digital commerce.
Our north star is can we get a billion people into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade? If we do that, we'll build a business that is as big as our current ad business within this decade. I think that's a really exciting thing. I think a big part of how you do that is by pushing the open metaverse forward, which is what we're going to do.
He summed up Meta's competition with Apple as going beyond simply the metaverse but also the future of the internet.
So yeah, Apple is going to be a competitor. I think that that's pretty clear, but it's actually a very deep competitor. It's not just [that] they have a device that has some more features than us. It's a very deep, philosophical competition about what direction the internet should go in. And I am proud of the investments that we're making to help push forward the open metaverse on this and hopefully make the next version of computing a bit more open.
You can find out more about Apple's plans by visiting our comprehensive overview.
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