Metaverse Dominance: Nvidia Winning, Meta Flailing

Nvidia’s GTC conference is over, but if you want to see what’s coming with AI, including generative AI like ChatGPT, robotics, self-driving electric cars, and the metaverse, watch CEO Jensen’s keynote Huang is worth it.

Much of Nvidia’s success stems from its work on the Metaverse, which comes at a time when Facebook, which changed its name to Meta, has largely failed to bring a successful Metaverse product to market.

Let’s explore why Nvidia’s metaverse effort was a huge success while Facebook’s became one of the costliest failures in tech history. We’ll end with my product of the week, an HP Chromebook that may be the best Chromebook ever built.

The success of Nvidia’s metaverse

Nvidia has been working on elements of the metaverse for about 28 years. He focused on the commercial market almost exclusively because the corporate sector would derive significant financial benefits from the metaverse. Not only is the commercial market more willing to pay for an expensive tool, but the potential savings that would result would also significantly mitigate the initially high price of any new technology.

After all, PCs were business tools in volume, to begin with. Due to their high initial cost, the mainstream market for PCs did not emerge until much later. Microsoft did something similar with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and HoloLens, allowing it to significantly outperform peers like Google Glass early on.

Nvidia – whose metaverse tool is called Omniverse – also realized early on that it couldn’t build its metaverse tool on its own, so it partnered with many companies to develop both desktop and specialized servers and critical services needed to deploy the result.

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Whenever Nvidia talks about its Omniverse success, the conversation includes a slew of partners who were, are, and will be needed to ensure a successful outcome for an offering that must integrate strongly with the real world.

Primarily through its GTC events, Nvidia has generated interest and education in the segment. Over time, it has created a comprehensive set of tools that help developers create their own metaverse instances and populate them with content. About this content, Nvidia piloted a universal design language so that virtual objects could be created at high speed to complement Nvidia’s metaverse vision.

The failure of Facebook’s metaverse

Facebook didn’t really begin to dabble in the metaverse until 2019, nearly 25 years after Nvidia began its efforts. Facebook seemed to focus more on consumers than businesses with its approach. Consumers are very cost and content driven. You can deploy an enterprise tool with few uses, but consumers want value and breadth, and unlike enterprises, they can’t offset the cost of a product with cost savings, at least not in this area.

To succeed, Facebook should be more complete in terms of content, cheaper in terms of price and associated services, and better than Nvidia because the tools used by consumers have a higher usability requirement than professionals who approach technology in their work.

Facebook mostly tried to go it alone and incurred exorbitant costs in rapidly building a metaverse, which seemed to depress Facebook’s valuation and ultimately led to mass layoffs.

The company has demonstrated that the cost of building a new market is simply too high for any one company to go it alone, even one that was once as profitable as Facebook. You need partners, developers, and others to help with development costs, because no company has the resources or funding to build an ecosystem, and the metaverse requires a deep ecosystem.

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Since Facebook is mostly ad-supported, it should be, but it’s no marketing expert. It doesn’t seem able to create demand for its products, which must be a big red flag for other advertisers, as it implies that Facebook isn’t good at marketing. It’s like a toolmaker who has never used the tools he makes.

Not only has this lack of capability crippled efforts like Facebook’s Metaverse, it’s also hurt related efforts like VR headsets. Having what amounts to a marketing superpower but not understanding how or even when to use it would be particularly stupid for Facebook if it weren’t for the fact that Google has the exact same problem.

While companies that don’t use their own technology are anything but new, they usually fail, but even when they perform poorly, these companies profit like crazy.

Wrap

So, Nvidia succeeded, and Facebook/Meta didn’t. Nvidia worked on this effort for decades, built a robust and thorough partnership system covering all aspects of the product, co-developed with customers who would use it, and used it themselves extensively during the development process. . So when Omniverse came out, it was a winner because the company rigorously developed a foundation for that success.

Facebook’s failure was because the company tried to act too quickly and on its own. He never even seemed to try to come up with a product offering that would be acceptable to his consumer audience, the costs associated with development exceeded the company’s resources, and he seemed to lose sight of his destination.

Launching a market is neither quick nor easy. It may seem so in the end, but it often takes decades of work to ensure eventual success. Nvidia has spent time, effort, and ecosystem building strategy, which has resulted in the success of its metaverse. Facebook missed that meeting, and while it seemed to know better than most what needed to be done for a more consumer-centric metaverse, it failed to execute.

The contrast between the two companies shows the importance of long-term strategic planning, partners and a clear idea of ​​where you want to end up. It also shows that for technologies like the metaverse, the commercial market is a much better place to start than the consumer market.

HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook

Last week I talked about the HP Dragonfly Pro Windows Laptop, but today I want to talk about its counterpart, the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook.

This Chromebook is arguably the successor to the older Google Pixelbook which didn’t sell very well, but focused on providing a premium Chromebook for those who wanted more of an Apple-like experience but with ChromeOS, not macOS.

Created in close collaboration between Google and Intel, this Chromebook is a unique offering. This is an Intel Evo device which should mean less hassle and greater reliability thanks to the extra quality control steps that Evo promises.

The HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook in Sparkling Black features a 14-inch touchscreen, 16GB memory and a 256GB SSD. (Image credit: HP)

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On the outside, the Sparkling Black color Chromebook looks nearly identical to the Dragonfly Pro Windows product I covered last week. It has a similar finish, is built with a strong focus on durability, plus:

• Long battery life;
• Decent performance – although Windows-based AMD offering seems to have more power;
• A high-quality backlit keyboard;
• Fingerprint recognition;
• 1200 nits outdoor viewable display; And
• The same new high performance charger that appeared in the Windows laptop. (Be aware that these chargers work poorly on airplanes, and you may want a three-prong extension cord for use on an airplane.)

HP’s Dragonfly Pro Chromebook has longer battery life and a much brighter screen than its Windows counterpart, but lacks facial recognition, which is common in most mid-to-high-end Windows laptops.

This device is for those who really love the ChromeOS experience but are tired of the cheap hardware that tends to surround this platform. As a result, the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, with a list price of $999.99, is my product of the week.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.