So much has been written in the past eight months about the metaverse. It’s the “hot topic” that people at cocktail parties, in university lectures, and pretty much anywhere it’s necessary to seem “in the know,” shake their heads and offer up an “Oh, yeah, definitely, the metaverse is so, you know, wow.”

And that is where the conversations usually end up, at the “oh wow” phase because very few people really understand the workings of this thing Mark Zuckerberg presented to the world last October. If you recall, Meta’s CEO pretty much told us that the metaverse was going to be the place where everything happens real soon.

In some ways, Mark is correct. In ways that he overlooks, however, thanks to the silo created by being a billionaire CEO, unless the above-mentioned conversations don’t start taking place in boardrooms and airport business lounges among company executives, then the metaverse will be stopped in its tracks because simply the technology is not there today.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s almost there; but that “almost” is kind of like the final 2,700 feet (848 meters) a climber must cover to get to the peak after entering the death zone on Mt. Everest. Standing in the now-common line to get to the peak of the world’s tallest mountain, you can see that summit but you just aren’t there; you still don’t have bragging rights, you know?

The metaverse in theory is a virtual ecosystem that like the internet will be persistently “out there” waiting for us, the users, to link up and engage with it.

In a similar way that we have personalized email addresses, avatars controlled by, and even looking like us, will represent our meta-physical presence to the world. Our personalized, and unique digital beings will then move freely across other micro-systems as representations of our real selves.

Sounds pretty futuristic, indeed, but the fact is a lot of this exists today. The one thing still lacking is the ability to move freely from one “siloed” micro-system to another but very smart people are working on that technology 24/7. These technological bridges will then connect the individual islands, or micro-systems, which currently make up our metaverse today.

While often it seems that it is consumers driving technological developments, thanks to the advances of Web3, enterprises need to fully recognize the potential benefits. It will be the desire for better and deeper communication with customers, partners, and even fellow employees that pushes companies to evolve the necessary technology at a much quicker clip than is demanded in the world of social media and even gaming.

In many ways, the shutdowns caused by COVID, which resulted in substantial financial losses for so many companies, served as a wake-up call. Companies, unprepared for a world where the home became the office, concluded that they had to be prepared for future disruptions. This transformative experience of the past two years now motivates many enterprises to create more robust and reliable digital worlds not only for meetings but also to help the companies remotely function.

This is a needed transition today for metaverse development. The pace of change must be driven by enterprises. After all, when a company understands that new technology can help it, for example by streamlining operations thus leading to higher profits, the accelerated move to the new technology is something that evolves all of us. This ethos has benefited humankind for centuries and it will occur again today.

Take, for example, Elisha Otis and his development of the technology that prevented elevators from crashing to the earth during malfunctions. The race to the sky in the form of skyscrapers was launched. Building upward enabled developers to use less land, thus resulting in lower real estate costs. In ways never before imagined earnings and profitability were maximized.

This is where we are today in terms of the metaverse. The basic technology is there and while many companies are doing commendable jobs pushing the envelope as they respond to the needs of a small number of customers coming to them, the finalization of development won’t happen until enterprise money flows freely. The metaverse needs an infrastructural push to get it into the hearts and souls of humankind.

Once the top managers like CFOs “get it,” the substantial saving made thanks to the creation of “virtual real estate,” CMOs will be pushed to use the technology more dynamically.

Enterprise use of the metaverse will be realized in the use of product showrooms cloud-streamed to customers. Perhaps, it will employees interviewed and then trained, or “upskilled,” virtually. Meetings, conferences, and exhibitions will also be organized in the digital, fully-immersive, branded worlds permitting companies to not only make substantial cost savings but lower carbon footprints.

As we sleep and wonder “where is the metaverse,” I can tell you from experience that the best technologies of the past twenty years are being culled and aligned with newer ones. Today, this relentless effort is allowing developers to deploy digital-twin technologies in ever more dynamic ways resulting in the fully-immersed, true-to-life worlds that we see more and more of. Nevertheless, these are small, individual cases and nothing on the level of the watershed moment we need.

Returning to our elevator analogy. The hoist ropes in elevators could only reach 1700 (518 meters) feet thus preventing the construction of the mega-tall structures commonplace over the last 50 years. Something as simple but genius as the “sky lobby” was introduced in The John Hancock Center in Chicago in 1969. It took just one developer wanting to maximize space better, and more efficiently for business, and suddenly the sky was no longer far enough for the more adventurous.

This is where we are today in terms of the construction of the metaverse. We are looking upward waiting for our “sky lobby moment.” Only this time, when it occurs it will be only the stars that limit us.

And then, those conversations about the metaverse will no longer be limited to “smart” people at cocktail parties or in boardrooms. Folks standing in line in the supermarket too will be talking about their meta-physical presence.

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The past holds the answers to today’s problems. “Be curious, not judgmental,” at least until you have all the facts. Think and stop watching cable news.