It's never a good sign when the world at large – not just the specialist press – decides that your new business venture has failed so badly that it's actively funny. That's precisely what has happened to Meta's flagship metaverse product, Horizon Worlds, over the past few weeks.
As various reports have shown up the low user numbers and engagement with the service, and the company's struggle to get even its own employees to use it, the cup of schadenfreude has run over. Negative headlines in specialist technology and financial publications are to be expected, but Horizon Worlds has also become a regular punching bag for the mainstream media and particularly for America's late night TV hosts, who relish the spectacle of what seems, to the general public at least, like a billionaire's vanity project crashing and burning.
Even if that presentation of what's happening isn't entirely fair – and I'd argue that it isn't, though I wouldn't go so far as to suggest there's any particularly glittering silver lining on all the clouds gathering over Meta's metaverse ambitions – it's going to be a tough thing to recover from.