This year was a case study for how impossible it is to predict what will happen in the world of tech. Famous musicians staged a walkout from Spotify, the world’s richest man took over Twitter, the world’s richest man made a mess of Twitter, the “safest” crypto exchange collapsed and its former CEO was arrested and charged with numerous counts of fraud.
Despite these surprises, half the fun of reflecting at the end of one year is guessing what will come in the next. So we’re going to try our hand at it … again.
Here are seven predictions for the tech industry in 2023.
The metaverse will break out from under Meta’s shadow
The metaverse is much more than Meta’s troubled pet project, and in 2023 will start to receive the recognition it is due—in all its variety and possibility. Through its first year in the limelight, the metaverse was overshadowed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own vision, which includes legless avatars, unwieldy VR headsets and massive take rates on the sale of digital assets. So when The Zuck was inevitably chastised, much of the criticism fell on the underlying concept itself.
Conflating the metaverse with Meta is like conflating social media with Facebook. Maybe at the tech’s onset, doing so was understandable, but soon new platforms and developments came onto the scene and shed light on how expansive social media can be. Next year, the same will begin to occur for the metaverse.