are markets where two or three of the U.S. tech titans compete, there isn’t a meaningful product category where all five tear chunks out of one another. That is set to change as they, along with Asian giants such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., pile into the augmented- and virtual-reality technology of the metaverse. As big as the pie might turn out to be, there are going to be market share winners and losers. there are markets where two or three of the U.S. tech titans compete, there isn’t a meaningful product category where all five tear chunks out of one another. That is set to change as they, along with Asian giants such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., pile into the augmented- and virtual-reality technology of the metaverse. As big as the pie might turn out to be, there are going to be market share winners and losers there are markets where two or three of the U.S. tech titans compete, there isn’t a meaningful product category where all five tear chunks out of one another. That is set to change as they, along with Asian giants such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., pile into the augmented- and virtual-reality technology of the metaverse. As big as the pie might turn out to be, there are markets where two or three of the U.S. tech titans compete, there isn’t a meaningful product category where all five tear chunks out of one another. That is set to change as they, along with Asian giants such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., pile into the augmented- and virtual-reality technology of the metaverse. As big as the pie might turn out to be, there are going to be market share winners and losers. to be market share winners and losers.while there are markets where two or three of the U.S. tech titans compete, there isn’t a meaningful product category where all five tear chunks out of one another. That is set to change as they, along with Asian giants such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., pile into the augmented- and virtual-reality technology of the metaverse. As big as the pie might turn out to be, there are going to be market share winners and losers. there are markets where two or three of the U.S. tech titans compete, there isn’t a meaningful product category where all five tear chunks out of one another. That is set to change as they, along with Asian giants such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., pile into the augmented- and virtual-reality technology of the metaverse. As big as the pie might turn out to be, there are going to be market share winners and losers.That’s significant because these companies are valued on their growth potential. If they all end up promising growth from the same pool of future customer spending, some will end up disappointing their investors. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in particular has said the metaverse will provide the next leg of growth, and he’s betting billions of dollars on hardware and software innovations. But the metaverse will be more competitive than even social media. Apple’s crackdown on mobile advertising, which has already tempered Meta’s revenue growth, is surely just a taste of the fierce contest to come.
Apple may not yet have made a big move when it comes to the metaverse, but its share price still declined when Bloomberg News reported that the release of a mixed augmented- and virtual-reality headset it’s developing would be delayed. In other words, investors are already pricing expectations for the as-yet-unannounced product into Apple’s valuation.
The best strategy for the respective companies would be to rapidly determine which parts of the metaverse they can conquer and which they can’t. Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft rapidly abandoned efforts to enter the smartphone market when they concluded there was no point in challenging Apple’s dominance. That didn’t stop them from finding ways to make good money elsewhere in the mobile economy. A similar approach is advisable here. It may be a greater challenge for Meta, which is betting on the metaverse as a way to evade smartphone gatekeepers such as Apple, than for, say, Microsoft, whose cloud business will benefit from the metaverse even if its consumer-facing offering is subpar. For consumers, the competition could mean a price war that makes the gear cheaper than they’d otherwise expect. Let the gold rush commence.
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