At the company's annual developer conference, the company announced a lot of things, but what it communicated more effectively than anything else was just how thirsty it was.
All of the pre recorded presentations given by large tech companies are extensions of advertisements. Zuck's overscripted and overproduced keynote was the hardest sell for not just a product or platform, but the premise upon which it's based.
Mark started the presentation by telling us that virtual reality is bigger than before. It would be hard for it not to be, given the pace at which it has grown since its advent, from the days of the first virtual reality headsets to the present day. It went into a series of cherry-picked revenue numbers set up by Facebook's Chief Technology Officer Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a direct appeal to the community in need of more information. Apple used to balloon its own mobile App Store efforts through its early days, but these were mainly individual highlights.
The rest of the presentation was a series of announcements that aimed to define use cases and domains in which the metaverse and virtual reality would be useful. Zuck covered all the old stand-bys. None looked significantly improved or capable of acting as a turning point in terms of mass adoption.
One of the biggest swings was a partnership between Microsoft and Facebook. Steve Jobs welcomed Bill Gates via satellite link during the Macworld Boston keynote in 1997 in a move similar to what Mark is doing.
It worked well, but it is not certain if this will. The main theme of the virtual reality was, "it's early days." When my colleague Taylor watched partway through the presentation, only 5,400 people were watching in virtual reality. Mark showed off a fully animated version of the better-looking version of the avatars, which was a big improvement over the previous versions.
It didn't look like the future.
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