Dollar Bills and Expectations
The collective experience of our existence is rooted in a series of openly connected synapses in our brains working in unison toward a common goal. Whether that goal is walking while chewing gum or co-creating the Metaverse, the core principle works the same. While the model for interoperability may be closer to us than we think, the challenge lies in the hardcoded realities of bringing a new idea to existing systems.
Even with Facebook’s announcement to rebrand as Meta, the majority opinion on the structure of the Metaverse falls within the confines of open connectivity and interoperability. Unfortunately, this is counter to the way many things are currently built. Whether it’s a business or a platform, resources are poured in to support an idea. It could be an inventor designing a new product or a software engineer writing code for a new marketplace. The resources applied could be financial, technical, or creative. Either way, they almost always translate back to dollar bills and expectations. The kind of dollar bills that are sent from one account to another hoping to be returned as five, ten, or twenty dollar bills. In today’s startup ecosystem, the expectation for profitability and return to investors is a key performance indicator and primary expectation.
In terms of the Metaverse, interoperability means enabling users of your platform or product to combine aspects of your experience with those of your competitors. Let’s consider a hypothetical legacy example in the world of electrical distribution and large physical construction projects. In this case, interoperability would mean General Electric (GE) certifying an electrical distribution system on Facebook’s new data center campus while allowing Facebook to populate the system with Schneider breakers. Let’s suppose that there is a particular use case that supports an internal capability that Facebook is cultivating to drive this requirement. Even if the electrical system components favor GE ninety-to-one, that small percentage of Schneider equipment in the system could lead GE to not support the system over time. From a sales perspective, GE may consider the volume of business and the risk of losing the entire project to a competitor and ultimately decide to accept the terms of the deal. Digging a little deeper, the design engineer may be incentivized to support GE by committing to training and being shortlisted on projects requiring a certified designer. In addition, the distributor or contractor would have likely participated in similar training programs with year-end rebates to reward the partnership. In this case, GE is operating in a way most profit-oriented companies operate. They are incentivized to maximize the sales and installed base of their products, which is the procedural norm in most industries.
Moving to a more modern example, gaming companies like Epic Games work hard to provide groundbreaking AAA game experiences for their players, which requires well-conceived strategies for player acquisition and retention to support the investment. Like GE and many other companies, they are trying to maximize the return on the development of their IP and technology. They want to keep players in their environments to maximize revenue opportunities. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it may prove to be an antiquated business model that will not serve the desired functionality of the Metaverse.
Identifying the problem is usually the easy part. What about a solution?
What if we put our collective money in an equal position to that of our mouths by actually incentivizing interoperability? Instead of play-to-earn, let’s consider co-create-to-earn. What if we developed an interoperability token and DAO structure that rewards stakeholders for making tangible moves toward Metaverse interoperability? There are tokens on the market today with questionable utility and even less power to drive impactful social change. This token could drive the adoption of a new collaborative methodology. DAOs have proven to align and incentivize collective contribution toward specific solutions that are mutually beneficial. Could it drive investment decisions, design options, and product development strategies that serve an open Metaverse?
A series of walled-off experiences is not the Metaverse. The foundation of Web 2 economics involved bringing customers to a platform and keeping them there for as long as possible, which usually ends up in a series of zero-sum games. Trying to win the pole position of the Metaverse is like trying to win at meditation. No matter how hard you try to meditate, you are missing the point of meditation. If we want to create something truly innovative, we need to reframe the economics that power innovation today.
Who’s with me?
