Josh Marinacci, building on top of my metaverse rundown:

Let’s get to one of the big points of the article I started this rant with, that if VR couldn’t be popular during a global lockdown when everyone had lots of free time and was trapped inside, then it would never be popular. While that might be true for Horizon, it is not true about VR in general. Truthfully VR was dying before COVID. I know because I was there.

I worked in Mozilla’s Mixed Reality group from 2017 to 2020. I saw all of this first hand. Most investments were turning sour before COVID.

Marinacci’s closer-to-the-inside voice is worth your time if you are at all interested in this bizarre chapter in tech company history. If anything, I think it lends credence to my theory that the pandemic was the fuel powering these dreams, since it became the justification for maintaining investors’ waning interest — until it was not.