It can feel a little odd to write about anything other than generative AI these days, but I sometimes remind people that all the things that we were talking about in October 2022 are still there. E-commerce is still growing (it’s now 40% of non-food retail in the UK!), Amazon has a $50bn ad business, peak TV is over, and Meta is still investing in VR and AR - at least $50bn so far.

There’s nothing new to say about this: Meta has a device at roughly the right price that isn’t good enough yet, and Apple has a device with a much better spec, at least on some measures, that isn’t cheap enough or light enough yet (I wrote about that here). And meanwhile, we don’t have product-market fit.

Some VR apps do well, but the platform at a whole is small, and not really growing either. Meta probably sold 1m of the Quest 3 (seen in the spike in Q4 2023, but compare with this data from Deloitte for the UK - the installed base is basically flat and only 20% of people who own one use it every day. That’s a 2% DAU penetration.

As I’ve written a few times before, it’s obvious that the devices will get better, lighter and cheaper, but much less obvious whether that’s enough. How many people will care?

We should be careful of saying ‘no-one will do that’ - we all do things every day that ‘no-one would ever do.’ But equally, we should be careful of presuming that everyone will want this just because you do, or just because it’s really cool. Drones and 3D printers are really cool too, but most people don’t care, and even games consoles are far from universal - on that Deloitte data, perhaps 16% of people are daily users (Ofcom, the UK TMT regulator, has more detailed data for the UK here).

Something can be amazingly cool and part of the future, but not a big part of the future. I don’t know what xR will be, and I don’t think we can know today, but we do know that this does not have any kind of mass-market product-market fit yet, and doesn’t seem close.

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