This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on November 12th, 2021.

The future for many tech companies is suddenly spelled “metaverse”. But when the vision of a 3D world doesn’t fit, the companies quickly find a way to ride the wave — without changing their strategy.

The year was 2011. Google was about to launch its new social network, Google+. Expectations were sky-high, and Vic Gundotra – then one of the company’s most senior tech executives – did nothing to lower them.

“Sharing on the internet is awkward. Even broken. And we plan to fix it.”

Against the backdrop of Facebook’s recent success, every tech giant wanted to get on board with what was then called “Web 2.0”, or the social web. The term, coined by author and internet legend Tim O’Reilly a few years earlier, referred to letting users participate in and create content on the internet. At the time, Instagram had only existed for a year and TikTok hadn’t been born even as a thought. Still – the trend was too strong for Google to ignore.

But letting users share information and content with each other turned out to be harder than it first looked. Google+ became one of the search giant’s largest and most public failures, and was shut down in 2019 after a long, slow decline. The social web didn’t fit Google’s strengths as a company.

Trends like this come to Silicon Valley at regular intervals. Concepts and ideas everyone has to engage with – and show off some footwork around. CEOs are forced to explain their strategy both to the market and to their employees.

The trend on everyone’s lips today is the metaverse. Facebook has renamed its parent company to Meta, and recently companies like Epic Games, Microsoft, Roblox and Tencent have all made statements about how they fit into – and help build – this new digital universe. This summer, an exchange-traded fund even launched in the US that invests only in metaverse-related companies.

Does this mean the world’s biggest tech companies are about to collide as they all aim for the same target? Possibly when it comes to the semantics. Because it is easier to appropriate a new and hyped term than to actually rework your company’s strategy to fit a new world. When Microsoft describes an animated 3D world inside its communications platform Teams where you can talk to your colleagues, it’s similar enough on the surface to be called a metaverse. But an animated chat on a corporate intranet is not what the trend is really about.

The Canadian analyst Matthew Ball, a co-founder of the fund mentioned above, has written the most influential pieces on the subject. He describes the metaverse as an “interoperable network of 3D virtual worlds rendered in real time”. The key word is the slightly clunky “interoperable”, which means several systems work together. So no single company owns the metaverse — it works much like the internet itself. You can link back and forth, and it is accessible to – and to some extent belongs to – everyone. You can describe it as a new kind of internet world in 3D where you can work, play and socialize.

In practice, there are a number of large American companies that account for a very large share of all internet usage and want to position themselves around the metaverse. The names are familiar – Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Netflix. Their interest in painting a vision around this new trend is therefore entirely understandable. We will see a race in which everyone wants to be associated with the metaverse – but from different starting points and with different visions.

Expect, then, more statements like the one from Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, who said last week that “we’re building toward a metaverse. I’m very excited about that vision.” So we are talking about a file server that syncs documents, which is now also going to store digital files in the metaverse. Apple’s much-discussed new mixed-reality glasses are expected to launch soon. They will likely be positioned as a way into the metaverse. Niantic – the maker of the popular Pokémon Go – just released its platform for what it calls the “real-world metaverse”. Google, which recently stopped supporting its own VR effort Daydream, will almost certainly find a new way to fit in here too.

Don’t mistake all of these statements for a shared, unified vision of the future. VR, AR and 3D worlds being just around the corner is nothing new. Apple launched its animated 3D emojis – animojis – back in 2017. The tech companies will keep doing their own thing, but they have now found a new and popular wrapper to put around it.

So what comes of all this? It will probably end up being a new internet universe of some kind – but for some companies, their bets will turn out more like another Google+ and the emperor’s new clothes.

Mark Zuckerberg is at least going big. Facebook is investing SEK 85 billion in its metaverse – this year alone. But Zuckerberg also has a major pivot to make. Analyst Brent Thill argues that Snap – with its AR filters, bitmojis and 3D maps – is far ahead of Facebook on the metaverse, without ever having used the term (yet). Maybe you don’t need the hyped terminology to win in this new world after all.