I listened to the conference calls of Microsoft and Apple this week. What did they tell about the metaverse?
## Microsoft
CEO Satya Nadella:
> And, as the digital and physical worlds come together, we are seeing real enterprise metaverse usage. From smart factories, to smart buildings, to smart cities, we are helping organizations use the combination of Azure IoT, Digital Twins, and Mesh, to help digitize people, places, and things, in order to visualize, simulate, and analyze any business process. Ecolab, for example, is using these tools to build its own platform to model and optimize water management.
> And with Mesh for Teams, we’re bringing the metaverse to Teams, helping employees at organizations like Accenture access a shared immersive experience where they can have watercooler-type conversations, and even whiteboarding sessions.
> And with our planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard, announced last week, we are investing to make it easier for people to play great games wherever, whenever, and however they want, and also shape what comes next for gaming as platforms like the metaverse develop.
> The first place where we see this is the increasing digitization of people, places, and things to be able to really help businesses automate processes to the next level. Today, between Azure IoT, digital twins and Mesh, we have many examples where customers are engaged with us. That’s what will show up in Azure and we’re investing significantly there. Up the stack, I would say. Dynamics, Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, that’s a solution that’s in preview today. That’s about really being able to take a retail space or a connected factory or a building and essentially create a complete new software category, which is about managing physical processes. Just like CRM and ERP and supply chain management, we now have a suite which is all driven by Connected Spaces, which is going to automate physical processes. Teams is going to have Mesh meetings or these immersive meetings, which will start first of all on 2D screens, whether it’s PCs or phones, and then lead up to even immersive experiences if you wear your VR or AR goggles. That’s another place. And then, of course, gaming, that will be a natural place for us. And today, if you think about the activity, when I talked about the Forza numbers, right, that’s a place where you could say already people are investing in their avatars, people are building Minecraft worlds. And so very naturally, you can see us extend gaming as the metaverse evolves. On the devices side, one of the things we’re very excited to be doing is what we’re doing with HoloLens and all the experience we’re gaining on the optics, on the silicon side, and all the way to the cloud in terms of some of the foundational services, driven by all the HoloLens use cases in the enterprise. That’s the broad portfolio. We’re going to invest across the entire tech stack. The demand will come in different forms for different categories, but we feel very well-positioned to be able to catch what I think is essentially the next wave of the internet, right? Just like the first wave of the internet allowed everybody to build a website, I think the next wave of the internet will be a more open world where people can build their own metaverse worlds, whether they’re organizations or game developers or anyone else. ## Apple
CEO Tim Cook, asked about the metaverse:
> We saw a lot of potential in this space, and are investing accordingly. There are now more than 14K ARKit-enabled apps in the App Store.