This is the third part of my return of the undead series. The first two parts dealt with identifying what components or building blocks a metaverse ecosystem needs to consist of. These components basically define how metaverse can work and serve as a model for the identification of how/where participants in an ecosystem could earn their revenues.

These building blocks are mainly independent of the notion of a(n open) metaverse, as described by Tony Parisi in his article The seven Rules of the Metaverse. They also apply to a more multiverse type world of a collection of closed metaverses – something that I really do not want to call metaverse.

The openness, that is necessary for a “metaverse” to thrive can be achieved either by common consent or via regulation – or more likely by a combination thereof. In any case, I believe that some amount of regulation is necessary in order to create and maintain a level playing field and to avoid one or few companies hijacking the area – as this is a platform game and platform games prefer size and allow only few dominant players.

• Users and creators use front-end applications that enable them to create the and interact with the virtual worlds that are offered. It is here, where the experience happens.
• These applications run on devices that offer the necessary sensors and actuators.
• The front-end applications connect to one or more virtual worlds that are provided as a service and that themselves rely on technology platforms.
• All this gets connected by an infrastructure that includes servers, storage, networks, chips, etc, as well as the necessary services around them.

Besides my framework, other people or organizations have developed own value chains, e.g., Jon Radoff or Sciencx, to name only two.

In the second article of this mini-series, I searched for compelling use cases that support both, B2B and B2C scenarios. As you can imagine, especially the use case frontier is quite difficult. What we see is a whole lot of use cases that base on existing, sometimes quite innovative, technology which gets quickly rebranded using the “metaverse” moniker.

The whole topic is still evolving, and we are in a situation that can remind us of the gold rush at Klondike: A stampede of hopefuls rush into the “area” with big hopes of getting rich.

We all know what happened back then.

As I laid out in my article, the currently existing metaverse use cases are mainly focusing on the concept of NFTs and around applying real world concepts, especially scarcity, to the digital world. They mainly address consumers, real estate and retail. B2B use cases are far less evolved and often include statements like “in future”. Another observation is that many existing technologies and solutions are quickly relabeled to leverage the metaverse traction. It is not too difficult to find several year-old demos on e.g., VR and AR, that didn’t use the term metaverse. Except, now they do. The same can be observed for the more recent phenomena of blockchain and NFT.

The good news is that they topical hype seems to subside.

All this brings us to an interesting question.

Who will rule?

“One Ring to rule them all,

One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all

And in the darkness bind them.”

From the Lord of the Rings

To get an idea about a possible answer, it is useful to have a look at above diagram from a slightly different angle and organize it around what happens on which layer. This gives an idea of what services and hence which value vendors on the various layers create for customers.

The diagram could be broken down into further layers, but these four should suffice. This way, we can visualize for ourselves, where there are opportunities for metaverse players. The diagram does not claim to be complete in any way, when it comes to the embedded boxes, which indicate the services that are on which layer.

• The experience layer holds the applications and services that users and creators are consuming or creating on the devices that they are using,
• which form the next layer.
• Via the devices and apps a lot of (cloud) services can be created and consumed that live on the application and technology platform. Think of this as a combination of SaaS and PaaS layer.
• Lastly, we have the physical infrastructure that runs the whole thing.

The boxes in the four layers are of course indicative only and do not claim any completeness.

However, what is clear is that there are multiple players in each of these boxes, specialists as well as generalists. Some players do appear in multiple boxes and in more than one layer.

As figure 1 shows, the metaverse market is an ecosystem play. Ecosystem markets automatically put players at an advantage that already have and/or offer reach, offer a platform for other market participants or are infrastructure players. Of critical interest in this ecosystem are players that provide access to very low latency and high bandwidth mobile communications and those who own the IP for relevant chips.

This seems to favor big companies like telcos and ISPs as well as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Roblox, etc. which already have achieved quite some scale. Or companies like Nvidia, which produces the necessary chips; or ARM, which develops and holds a lot of the IP that is necessary to build these chips.  

On the other hand, big companies often have a challenge with (disruptive) innovation.

Why?

This is a structural challenge. It is not that big companies are less innovative than small companies per se. However, they often need to answer to their shareholders on a frequent basis and therefore to provide fast returns with relatively high margins for every investment, to protect their valuations.

This favors nimble startups and VC companies who enjoy more slack when it comes to fast returns. Some of the startups in the relevant areas will either develop for a niche or sector and be successful – or they will be acquired by bigger players.

So, who will it be?

Neither! Or actually most of them.

This might surprise you, but the answer is quite simple – and obvious from the waning popularity of the term. Some big companies didn’t even jump on the train.

Let’s count some reasons:

1. The term as such was over-hyped. There is no real concept or overarching value proposition associated with it.
2. In the next years we will not see the necessary standardization that would be necessary to deliver on any broader concept. Given this, vendors will concentrate on their patches.
3. Most technologies that are currently touted as “metaverse” technologies existed and often thrived before the term got hyped. They will continue to develop and many of them successful. The overarching dream of “metaverse” is simply not necessary.
4. Companies will fall back to concrete/specific use cases in which technologies can help solving the issue at hand. This might be a combination of VR/AR and IoT, or robotics, telepresence, holograms, digital twins, sometimes blockchains, etc., in different combinations.

I do think that this would be a good development. The appetite for innovation has been spurred by the hype, interesting use cases that solve actual problems will be solved. These solutions will connect as necessary.

This is business as usual.

What do you think? Let me know!

In the first part of this article, I explained why there is no metaverse (yet), although the idea is around for quite some years. Despite the current hype, it is just a re-emerging topic. Foundational technologies like VR are around since as long as the 50s although VR really entered our minds only in the 90s. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language VRML got standardized in 1994 and its successor X3D in 2004. Half Life with the first highly immersive world was released in 1998.

I went into some definition and laid out a framework for a kind of an architecture that can support whatever this idea evolves into, with some emphasis on common standards and some governance. These are necessary, because the metaverse is nothing more than a platform of platforms, which means that at the end of the day it is a kind of a protocol. 

Or else we will see a collection of (competing) multiverses.

I closed with some questions that need to be answered.

• Why does it need a metaverse, if at all?
• What are meaningful use cases?
• Who will rule? Startups? Existing players? Governments?

So, let’s dig into it.

Why metaverse?

Now that the definition work is out of the way, one of the main questions is what the value that a person or organization can expect from being involved in or using “metaverse” is. After all, it is real money that is spent, whereas the whole concept of metaverse is digital and virtual.

That raises several interesting questions like: Where is the link between the physical and the digital world, if any? Where is the problem that cannot be solved without the or be solved in a better way using “metaverse”? Can “metaverse” solve real-world problems at all? Does it need to? Or, on another level: Will all the involved technologies, e.g., the ones stated in the first part of this article, converge to a solution or will they stay mainly separate?

In brief asking “why metaverse” is another form of asking: What are the use cases?

Reading a lot of posts and article around this, it is apparent that the vast majority of authors is looking at consumer oriented B2C or retail use cases. There does not seem to be much thought about how to use what is now touted metaverse technology in B2B use cases.

Looking at what is happening now with sites like Decentraland, a 3D virtual world browser-based platform, and similar sites, we e.g., see a lot of sale of virtual land. According to a MetaCentric Solutions report quoted by CNBC, real estate sales on the four largest metaverse platforms alone topped $500 million in 2021 and reached as much as $85 million in January 2022 alone. Another high-visibility use case is the sale of non-fungible tokens, NFTs. The mechanisms that are applied in both cases are basically 1:1 translations of physical mechanisms into the virtual realm. Virtual “land” is scarce, and its value depends on the proximity to a preferred location like a “city center” or “land” that is owned by celebrities. Here we are basically talking about establishing virtual residences or virtual shopping centers like in the real world, creating demand/supply economics as in the real world.

Other current mainstream use cases include the sale of digital art as non-fungible tokens. An NFT is “unique”.

However, scarcity and proximity are highly artificial concepts in a virtual environment. As opposed to physical land, virtual “land” can be created in almost infinite amounts. The same holds true for digital art. Physical proximity is meaningless in a virtual environment. The distance to the neighbor is just a URI, which means that the distance between everyone is the same. Essentially, everyone can be everybody’s neighbor in a virtual environment. Think “wormholes” or “teleportation” – or just “Internet”.

In addition to the virtual scarcity, there is FOMO, the fear of missing out.

What we also see is the move of events into “metaverse” platforms. There have been concerts on Fortnite or music festivals on Minecraft, even an MMA fight night on Decentraland.

And then, there of course is gaming. Many modern gaming engines are all about immersing oneself and/or creating own worlds.

Using these engines, gamers can create and monetize own worlds and artifacts in some gaming environments. Think Roblox as one well-known example. Gamers also spend a lot of money in gaming worlds to dress their avatars, by gear or to increase their chances to reach the next level. Brands like Ralph Lauren are already offering digital clothing collections for our avatars while Coca Cola and other brands are selling NFTs.

This is akin to us buying physical fashion, art or furniture for our houses.

Which, fun fact and shameless plug, colleague Mark Tamis and yours truly put into a “metaverse scenario” already in 2011. Are you into ancient history? Then read Mark’s post from back in the day. I think, in those days I even talked about using the XBox 3D cameras to create a virtual dressing room mirror to superimpose clothing to give a feeling how it would look when being worn by a person.

But, back to the topic. Following the idea of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, one sees that for persons these use cases are clearly targeted at the higher order needs of esteem, aesthetics and self-actualization. Retailers, on the other hand, are still offered to cater to these by providing better online-offline (marketing) messaging using augmented and virtual reality.

One statement of caution is necessary. Today, it is hard to assess how many channels and interaction points “metaverse” adds to customers’ journeys. This is where the paradox of choice kicks in. If businesses offer their customers too many interaction points, they might send them into a selection paralysis, essentially stunning them with too many options to choose from. As a result, they choose none. Consequently, it is necessary to think hard, which interaction points to offer and which not

The even more interesting part of this is that both, the monetization as well as in-game transactions and the mentioned retail scenarios do not require crypto-technologies, which in consequence means that blockchain is not essential to the concept of “metaverse”.

But what about B2B?

Now, that I have covered B2C scenarios, the main question arises is whether there are B2B scenarios. There does not seem to be a hell of a lot of talk about them although the B2B area should be far bigger than the B2C field as it covers the whole value chain of a business.

Looking a little deeper, there are some, albeit mostly not yet following the new terminology of “metaverse”. Mostly, they deal with AR and VR and have a very wide range.

One of the best-known ones is the use of AR technology for field technicians, where the supporting system overlays data and or schematics to a system to help the technician doing the job faster. This is probably also one of the few cases that is in production.

Another of these cases is virtual collaboration. There are plenty of online collaboration tools around. These can be seen as a kind of precursor to “metaverse”.  They also can, and oftentimes will, be augmented with spatial computing technology to provide a collaboration environment that is more immersive. For example, Microsoft is combining MS Teams with its Mesh technology and HoloLens to do exactly that. It is still early stage but shows the way.

The rest is often a whole lot of “can be” and prototypes, like “metaverse” in HR. You will find a number of articles that deal with … how one can imagine a future application.

Some of the early scenarios actually quite intriguing. Most of these involve spatial computing in the form of 3D simulations. Think of being able to simulate the workings of a machine in a factory or to do visualize future route planning in a warehouse.

Microsoft seems to sense some application in the healthcare market, if one combines a $20 billion Nuance acquisition with an almost $70 billion Activision acquisition.

Also, the possibilities to directly interact with data in a novel way are immense. 

That is why I am thinking that the B2B opportunity is far bigger than the B2C opportunity. 

Did it materialize yet? 

Not really.

Will it come?

You bet! Too many business software vendors are investing into spatial computing, augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality technologies.

Should it be called “metaverse”?

Hell, no!

The remaining big question is similar to the main question in the Lord of the Rings: Will there be the one to rule them all? Or slightly different: Who will rule? 

I guess, that is worth a third article.

There. Is. No. Metaverse.

I am sorry to be a party pooper but read me out.

It doesn’t exist. At least not yet. And not for quite some years to come. I am talking of a decade or more. Perhaps not ever. And whence it comes, it probably looks different from what we see now, and we will likely call it by a different name.

Does this statement surprise you? I mean, many people, companies and investors are looking at metaverse as being the next big thing. Crunchbase already in November 2021 reported more than $10.6bn being investedinto metaverse related startups. According to a Galaxy report quoted by Institutional Investor, crypto and blockchain startups alone collected more than $32bn in 2021. Microsoft just invested a whopping $70bn in Activision Blizzard, which is clearly a metaverse play. So much money cannot be wrong, right?

Google trends also suggests that there is quite some interest in these topics that came up quite recently and quite suddenly, which means that the trend has reached the masses.

Last, but not least, “Metaverse” is not a new concept, as it exists since at least 1998 – yes, I am talking about Half Life, the first person shooter game that is often credited with providing a highly immersive world as a first of kind. The first usage of the term itself is credited to Neal Stephenson, who used it in his novel “Snow Crash”. 

Still: It. Does. Not. Exist.

The biggest evidence for there not being a metaverse is that everyone (and their dog) is building one or even claiming to be or have one. One well known company even renamed itself to become meta. This is the initial spike of the red curve in the diagram above. Recently, Microsoft acquired the gaming company Activision Blizzard in what is taken as a “metaverse” play as well. The interest in NFT precedes the metaverse by about half a year. The above diagram clearly shows that a hype is going on. But then, to quote someone I highly respect: “It needs a hype to create lasting interest.”

All this does not mean that all the tech that is involved is yet to be implemented or useless. On the contrary, a lot of what it takes to make “metaverse” reality does already exist and often already has some benefit. Blockchain, NFT, AR/VR, mixed reality, AI, IoT and last, but not least: gaming and gaming engines … Computing power still follows the Moore’s law, and we can look forward to another significant bump once quantum computers become more widely available. Still, the question arises whether we see a bunch of technologies that offer solutions for a problem that is yet to be discovered.

Not that these existing technologies are already perfect, but still, they are good enough for the immersive experience that “metaverse” is or is supposed to be.

However, there is no common understanding or clear picture of what ‘metaverse’ is. Nothing evidences better that the whole topic is far from being understood than the abundance of terms that are used: metaverse, multiverse, omniverse, even exoverse or holiverse. Sometimes different terms describe the same thing. 

Some terminology

Let’s start by defining what the term metaverse actually means and how it relates to the term multiverse or transverse, as it is also sometimes called.

Again, too many terms, which indicate insufficient understanding.

Even in VC-environments, what is seen as ‘metaverse’ is quite different. The common denominators are “digital” and the notion of there being one metaverse as opposed to multiple metaverses. 

So, what does Merriam Webster say: “In its current meaning, metaverse generally refers to the concept of a highly immersive virtual world where people gather to socialize, play, and work”

Wikipedia refers to it as “a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, the term is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets.”

Now what is a multiverse?

According to Merriam-Webster it is “a theoretical reality that includes a possibly infinite number of parallel universes.”

Wikipedia defines a multiverse as “a hypothetical group of multiple universes. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists …”

Together, this basically suggests that Tony Parisi, is right when he states that there is only one metaverse as rule #1 in his article The Seven Rules of the Metaverse. I recommend reading this article.

Components of the metaverse ecosystem

Metaverse requires a number of layers:

• Devices that run the applications and offer the sensors and actuators that are needed to provide an immersive environment. These will come in all sorts of different form factors and with different capabilities, many of them as per yet unknown to us.
• The applications, worlds and other artifacts on the front end that enable users to safely and securely access the virtual world and to consume the services that are offered – free ones or paid ones. 
• The backend application software and the technology platforms used to build them. They will mostly be in the cloud and be delivered as a service. They will most likely also be in different clouds and be built using different platforms. A lot of very crucial functionality, from security, via identity, trust, needs to be provided here. Basically, everything that is behind current buzzwords/technologies like blockchain, NFT, DAO, along with all sorts of inter-business logic, APIs and other interfaces resides on this layer. One could say, that this is the muscle and the nervous system of the ecosystem.
• The infrastructures that provide computing power, storage, networking, etc. that these applications are run on. These will include hyperscalers as well as on premise stacks (which probably over time will be indistinguishable from each other). This is the skeleton of the ecosystem.
• And last, but not least, the hardware that is needed to drive it all. From single chips via mainboards, graphic cards to whatever.

Creators as well as users will use different devices and different parts of the provided apps and backend software to create and consume.

For metaverse in its sense as described by Parisi and others to work, all these layers need to follow a common set of open standards. This is basically the extension of TCP/IP to the next level. Without TCP/IP, we wouldn’t have an Internet at all.

Or else we will see an amalgamation of different and likely competing *verses that are incompatible with each other; they will be walled gardens. Note that open standards do not mean at all that everyone can transfer from one part of the metaverse into another at will. There may be, and in all likelihood will be, paywalls in between the various “worlds”. Some of the “worlds” may be only accessible to very few. But open standards ensure that it is possible. This would basically elevate the technical concept of “metaverse” from platform to protocol. 

Then, there needs to be some regulation, as not every player in the game is of equal strength. The weaker ones, which are usually the consumers or end users, but also smaller vendors, need strong governance that keeps the playing field as level as possible. When thinking of “metaverse” as a protocol, this could include bodies like the W3C but certainly also governments.

Now, this is getting long. Let me think a little further and write down my takes on

• Why does it need a metaverse, if at all
• Use cases that actually make sense
• Who will rule? Startups or existing big players? Or even governments?

Let me know what you think!

The News

On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced the intention to acquire Activision Blizzard with the vision of bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone, for $95 per share, which equals a transaction value of $68.7 bn. This is a bit more than eight times of the revenue that Activision Blizzards expect to have in the fiscal year 2022.

With this acquisition, Microsoft can add 400 million monthly active users to the already existing 25 million Game Pass holders.

Until the acquisition closes, the companies will run independently. After completion of the transaction, Activision Blizzard wil report to Phil Spencer, the newly appointed CEO of Microsoft Gaming.

This acquisition makes Microsoft the third largest gaming company by revenue, after Tencent and Sony.

The stock markets reacted with a sharp increase of Activision Blizzard shares to about $87, while Microsoft stock largely followed its pre-existing slight downward trajectory.

Here my analysis in a brief video.

The bigger Picture

We have currently around 3 billion people and growing, who are actively gaming. Millennials and younger do not even know a world without social media and smart phones. They often play using mobile devices. Microsoft, on the other hand, is available on basically every device and offers quite some hardware, too, either directly or via partners. Additionally, Microsoft already before was a known entity in the gaming market, e.g. owning gaming platforms like Minecraft and Doom. Still, according to Shacknews, Microsoft seems to have missed the own growth targets, even though an increase of Game Pass holders from 18 million to 25 million in the year 2021 is quite significant. 

Apart from the ubiquitous blockchain, NFT, DAOs, VR and other technologies, gaming is also one of the key ingredients to any upcoming metaverse, not in the least because of the widely offered possibility to create (and monetize) own worlds in the gaming engines that allow for immersion and the built-in offered possibility to virtually meet in the forms of avatars. 

And as “Metaverse” is largely uncharted land, there is a move to set standards by various companies, Meta, Nvidia, Sony, Tencent, Google, Apple, to just name a few heavy hitters. Following common business rationale, these standards need to be set fast, before someone else does, and especially before regulation kicks in.

This requires scale.

My PoV and Analysis

$68.7 is a whopping number that not many companies are able to pay. However, with a multiple of around 8, this is technically not an expensive acquisition. Yes, it still is a lot of money. It easily dwarfs the price that Take Two paid for Zynga ($12.7 bn) or the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft ($26 bn). Or Microsoft’s 2021 acquisition of Nuance Technologies for about $20 bn. 

Both companies are highly profitable and complement each other in the gaming world. And, as said, together they are number three in a platform market. This is the short-term play.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is quoted in the press release: “Gaming is the most dynamic anc exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms. We’re investing deeply in world-class-content, community and the cloud to usher in a new era of gaming that puts players and creators first and makes gaming safe, inclusive, and accessible to all.”

This shows the long-term game: Defining “Metaverse”.

Fellow analyst Jon Reed agrees. He considers this acquisition a “gaming play with a semi-trojan-horse long game as a “metaverse” play for Microsoft. Microsoft has the $ to place a big metaverse bet without facing too much downside.”

As gaming is, “Metaverse” is a platform play. Platform plays are about access to huge numbers of people and masses of personal data. This deal ties a massive community of gamers to Microsoft and therefore strengthens Microsoft’s access to this personal data. Microsoft without Activision wouldn’t have enough critical mass in terms of the size of its gamer community while Activision Blizzard would have been small fry by valuation. Tencent and Sony are the numbers one and two with valuations of $570 bn and $154 bn, respectively. Having said this, Electronic Arts, Epic are even smaller than Activision Blizzard. Even Roblox is smaller, but then this company is on a different trajectory.

All these companies will feel the pressure. Other companies with “Metaverse” aspirations, too. Microsoft just upped the ante.

One of the big remaining questions is: Will this merger succeed? Apart from regulatory considerations that seem to be partly addressed by forming a unit “Microsoft Gaming” with an own CEO?

The main obstacle here lies in company culture.

Looking at this topic, two very different ones collide with Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. While Microsoft is very strong on compliance, inclusion and non-discrimination, Activision Blizzard has exhibited a very toxic work culture. Analyst (and gamer) Marshall Lager says that “the company has seen the departure of several executives and development leads due to allegations of improper behavior, and the company as a whole has been implicated in union-busting and other unfair labor practices.” He continues: “If this deal goes through, Microsoft will have some delicate juggling to do. On the one hand, it should not mess with Activision Blizzard’s creative or marketing efforts, because that company’s brands are among the most popular and lucrative in the industry, with considerable fan support. On the other, it needs to do something in those very areas, because it’s where all of the sexual harassment and abusive labor practices have occurred over the years . How do you change the people and the behavior while maintaining the quality of their output?”

The success of this merger will largely depend on successfully bridging exactly this gap. 

One other thing is for sure. This acquisition clearly shows that the dream of a Web 3 as being an open decentralized version of the Internet just tanked. Remember: Web 2 or the original Internet have started with the idea of being open and decentralized and see what happened. Three times is not the charm here. At least not without strong regulation.

It is the end of 2021 and I do not have anything better in mind than writing a last post for the year. So let's do it.

There have been some terms that were used more than others with some of them actually being quite hyped. Some of them for the right reasons, some of them for the wrong ones.

My favorites of these terms include in no particular order:

• Metaverse
• NFT (non-fungible token)
• RPA or robotic process automation
• Hyper personalization
• Hyper automation
• Customer Journey Orchestration
• Low code / No code
• Artificial intelligence / machine learning

Hyper personalization

I already did a short video that expresses my thoughts on hyperpersonalization. You cannot really avoid the term when browsing the web with anything related to CX in mind. Back in the day, what is now called hyper personalization was called one-to-one marketing. This was in the eighties. The problem was that we didn’t have the technology nor the computing power to technically implement a contextually relevant 1:1 approach at scale and in real time. That’s why we worked with segments. 

Now we have the technology and computing power to address individuals contextually relevant in real time, nearly regardless of the size of the audience. Technologically, this is quite amazing, and if used consciously is of great benefit for customers and prospects. 

But there is nothing “hyper” about it. It is still personalization, maybe individualization. 

My wish for 2022: Let’s do away with the hyperbole before we start to desperately look for the next hyperlative – or should I call it ultralative?

Robotic process automation

No doubt, RPA is an important technology. It provides a fast and easy – maybe too fast and too easy – entry into digitalization of processes.

Its origins lie in automated UI based testing, applied to the automation of workflows.

Using RPA or its derivative intelligent RPA helps companies to increase the efficiency of their processes, especially if they stretch across various applications that have poor or no interfaces or that haven’t been integrated.

This works very well for processes that rely on structured data and in the case of intelligent RPA increasingly also with unstructured data.

Why too fast and easy then?

The problem is that it is hard to improve processes with RPA. Instead, existing processes get entrenched even more. This is also why it helps in digitalizing processes and not in a company’s digital transformation, which involves the creation of new, different processes. Still, it is an important technology as it helps reducing friction in existing processes, helping in reducing manual work and speeding processes up considerably. As a consequence, both employee experience and customer experience can get improved considerably.

My wish for 2022: Let’s merge RPA into workflow automation because this is what it is.

Low code / no code

We have seen low- and no code for a few years now but it really popped into people’s minds in 2021. Related terms are “citizen developer” and “democratization of development”. 

Again, another important technology that improved a lot over the decades. 

Yes, it is available for decades. Look at all the abilities to customize that enterprise systems offer for a long time. Admittedly, it often looked ugly and was not that easy to understand, but still, it was there.

Low code and now code have a tremendous value in workflow automation and systems configuration. 

My wish for 2022: May there be sufficient governance to avoid the database hell that we experienced in the good ole Lotus Notes times (or have these been the bad ole days?).

Hyper automation

This term is worth a rant. Gartner defines hyper automation as “a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including

• Artificial Intelligence (A)
• Machine Learning
• Event-driven software architecture
• Robotic process automation (RPA)
• Business process management (BPM and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS)
• Integration platform as a service (iPaaS)
• Low-code/no-code tools
• Packaged software
• Other types of decision, process and task automation tools”

There are many more definitions like this, published by many pundits. 

Automation exists like, forever. It is one of the very reasons for the existence of software. And it always included the use of multiple technologies, tools and platforms. Just adding a bunch of shiny category names that can be used to the definition, doesn’t add any hyper to automation.  

My wish for 2022: Let’s cut the crap and name it as what it is: automation or process automation. Sorry for these sharp words but here we are inventing a term just for the sake of inventing a term. This doesn’t add any value besides making some pundits appear important and/or visionary (with the emphasis on appear).

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)

There is no doubt that these two terms describe a set of technologies that are immensely powerful, given the availability of enough computing power. Machine learning is a subset of what artificial intelligence is. The technologies have entered a trajectory away from technology for technology’s sake towards being embedded into business process and outcome oriented. The technology itself is mutating from a kind of silver bullet to a mere helper. Of course, this is not always the case. There are still areas where AI is overrated, sometimes even dangerous. We are also seeing ethical problems and biased AI come up. Still, with the ongoing change the acceptance of AI and ML have increased a lot. 

My wish for 2022: May we see a continuation on this path along with an increasing focus on explainability and ethics. May we also continue to see “human augmented by machine” instead of “human replaced by machine”.

Metaverse

I have kept my three favorite ones till the end, the metaverse and, related to it, web 3.0, that is currently in everybody’s mouth being one of them. The preliminary peak of the hype was Facebook changing its corporate name to meta in October 2021.

Right now, nobody can credibly say what the metaverse will be, except that it will be a significant development towards communication and collaboration. But what is obvious is that metaverse will be another evolution of the platform play. It will be seen as a significant source of new business. The players are already lining up to achieve “dominance”. With the likely consequence that the “metaverse” will be broken down into a couple of walled gardens that are intended to further the garden owners’ agenda and lack interaction/integration. This breaks at least the first four of Tony Parisi’s seven rules of the metaverse.

So far, the metaverse reminds me of the gold rush at the Klondyke river. Many people rush there, most will return disillusioned (if at all) and a few (platform) players got incredibly rich.

My wish for 2022: Call me a dreamer but may there be a strong focus on above mentioned four rules, in particular openness and that no individual entity controlling it.

Non-fungible tokens

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data that is linked to a blockchain. It cannot be copied, substituted or subdivided. NFTs gained notoriety for being electronic identifiers that confirm the ownership of digital collectibles.

NFTs are closely related to the topics of blockchain, which is still trying to find a compelling use case, digital twins, and metaverse, which drives its hype. 

Given that, NFTs are yet another example of a solution in search of its problem. Or the other way round, it creates a totally new market for the exchange of digital assets.

The crux seems to be that everything seems to be around virtual, as opposed to physical assets. This means that, as long as no metaverse emerges, NFTs are actually not creating value but destroy it. Looking at sites like Decentraland where companies recently bought chunks of “real estate” for millions of dollars reminds me strangely of Second Life. But then, maybe I am just not creative enough to understand.

My wish for 2022: May we find a compelling use case for NFTs that creates a solution for an unsolved problem or provides a solution for a solved problem that is better than the existing ones.

Customer Journey Orchestration

I want to end this post on a positive note, that’s why I left customer journey orchestration to the end.

Customer journey orchestration is a technology that actually exists and that has some benefits. It helps businesses to think outside-in and to come to a mindset that their success is the consequence of making their customers successful. Implemented properly, it enables the identification of customers intents in real-time and to offer them touch points of their choice on their journey towards the solution to their challenge at hand (or job-to-be-done, if you will). It helps businesses to identify unnecessary friction in customer journeys and to remove it.

My wish for 2022: May we increase our understanding that automated processes like automated marketing campaigns are not customer journeys.