“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” -- William Gibson (Neuromancer) (where my sci-fi people at?)

Facebook is saying it is trying to do nothing short of ushering in the next generation of the Internet - a completely new virtual environment called the metaverse that William Gibson wrote about in 1984 (which I read then!).

It's very clear what Facebook is up to. People who say they are on a collision course with Shopify are missing the point. It's like saying the electric car is on the collision course with the horse and buggy. Well, yes, but not head on.

A few issues here however:

A Facebook-powered metaverse is likely a place I would not want to be exclusively. It's like saying, yes I want to be on a walled-garden AOL and not on the broader Internet. Facebook is not going to own the new virtual environment no matter what it says. It would not be open enough. -

Seems to me like a popular video game company is more likely to own this more so than Facebook.

Who is going to trust Facebook to do this?

Finally Facebook doesn't really have a vision for commerce. It has a vision for ads and influencers as individuals. To say that Facebook is going to incrementally improve its Shops offering in a way that materially threatens Shopify or others is laughable.