While there's still debate about what the metaverse will or could be at its full potential, there's no doubt that there's abundant hype and excitement surrounding this virtual universe. In this segment of Backstage Pass, recorded on Jan. 11, Fool contributors Demitri Kalogeropoulos and Jose Najarro discuss several household names that are leading the way in building the future of the metaverse.
Demitri Kalogeropoulos: I'll jump in, and I saw this cool article this morning actually in the Wall Street Journal, and the headline is "Microsoft Hit by Defections As Tech Giants Battle for Talent to Build the Metaverse." I clicked right on that one and was pretty interested the entire time.
Basically, the Wall Street Journal tracked down dozens of these former Microsoft (MSFT 0.13%) employees that have jumped over to now and they're working at Meta Platforms (META -0.30%), who we used to know as Facebook.
Like I said, somewhere in the dozens. Then there's a lot of these cases that Meta was offering to double their salaries in some cases, so you're seeing a lot of these people moving from Microsoft over to Meta.
We know Meta already has a pretty dominant share lead in the VR, Virtual Reality goggle space. But Microsoft has a good lead in the AR hardware space with their Augmented Reality hardware, so it's interesting to see this heat up. They interviewed a bunch of these employees that are also aware that a similar thing is happening. Apple's (AAPL 0.60%) noticing this too. Meta is trying to snatch engineering talent and stuff from Apple.
But one of the elements I found really interesting about this, that's not really new. I mean, these big guys compete with each other all the time, especially for some of these high-value employees and talent. But this is really consolidating the engineering know-how and a few of the big names that we all know, places like Alphabet (GOOG -1.57%) (GOOGL -1.76%) and Microsoft, Meta, and Apple.
I think the article mentioned how this is making really much, much harder for any smaller tech start-up company or any specialists to compete. Facebook I think, Meta has said they're totally willing to lose, to take a $10 billion hit next year on earnings just to invest in the metaspace.
Really I mean, I don't think any smaller company would just be super really difficult to compete with that thing. I think that's interesting. I think we're seeing this happen. In these articles, we're seeing how these big companies throw their weight around and how it can be really hard for anyone to disrupt these big 800-pound gorillas so to speak.
Jose Najarro: When I first read this article, Demitri, after you've shared it, I thought two things. The first thing I thought, maybe I should jump back into engineering to see how much Facebook might want to pay me.
The second thing was, it's pretty impressive how Microsoft and these tech giants, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are really focusing in this augmented reality, virtual reality market.
Obviously, when we hear the word metaverse, it seems crazy to some extent, but there are other tools that can be used with this virtual reality and augmented reality.
Technology that I feel keeps getting overshadowed by the word metaverse, and I think just by showing that, hey, these three companies that are giants in the tech industry right now are really focusing in here. This is something that we should keep an eye out for the digital transformation that should be happening within the next few years.
