2026.09.29 | Substack | META | Stratechery: Meta Agents & Enterprise

Meta has the chance to own the consumer agentic space; going for enterprise is a big mistake.

This looks awesome, and like a thorough rebuke of Apple’s approach to the Vision Pro hardware; I’m going to save further comment until I get a chance to try them. Next:

The privacy concerns are totally legitimate, but there are other advantages to these as well, including increased battery life. Finally:

This device was emblematic of the Connect keynote as a whole, which was completely live and landed in a tight 50 minutes. Everything just made sense, because Meta Connect Labs suddenly has a north star: this isn’t a VR division, or an AR division, or even an AI glasses division. Rather, Meta devices are Muse delivery vehicles, and nothing exemplifies that more than the Muse Charm. It might end up being a nothingburger, but it’s cute, just like Muse, and it only makes sense if Muse is a hit.

Indeed, this is the most powerful affirmation of how important Muse is, and what its potential might be: it can singlehandedly justify the more-than-a-decade twelve-figure losses that Reality Labs has incurred. Meta is well-placed to win the agent wars in consumer not just because Muse is tremendously well done and is riding on Meta’s distribution; they also have hardware ready to go to deliver Muse to you on your terms, both on your smartphone but also on independent devices.

Meta Enterprise Platform

From the Wall Street Journal:

Zuckerberg said on X:

Insert sad trombone sound.

I don’t think that most readers will be surprised, but I hate this, and it’s a real sour note after the last month. Serving enterprise customers is completely different than serving consumers, and there are very few companies — if any! — who are good at both. Enterprises require go-to-market skills that consumer companies lack; consumer companies can push the envelope on experiences and data usage that are verboten for enterprise companies. The underlying tech may be similar, but everything else is not just different, but diametrically opposed.

People will, of course, point at Google, but I’m not sure that’s a great example. First, it took Google multiple restarts and over a decade of leadership from Thomas Kurian to build a cloud business that is still third place in its market. Moreover, you could make the case that it isn’t an accident that Google hasn’t really done anything of note in the consumer market in those ten years, other than milk properties that preceded its enterprise expansion. Indeed, there is an argument that prioritizing Google Cloud has been a factor in Google’s lackluster AI offerings.

Meta right now, at this moment, sits in a very different position: Zuckerberg’s AI pivot has the potential to pay off, and all of the company’s focus and resources — including compute — should be focused on owning the consumer space in a way that hasn’t really been possible before. Meta is already dominant in terms of entertainment, but Muse gives them an opportunity to be the entry point for every other aspect of a user’s life.

That is, I suppose, the steelman argument here: a user’s life includes work, so why not bring Meta there as well? I think, however, that this harkens back to what I think was one of Zuckerberg’s most mistaken views; from The Facebook Effect:

I just flat out disagree with this; I laid out my argument in Social Networking 2.0:

This was tied to my enthusiasm for messaging and group chats:

There is certainly room to debate whether or not multiple identities make sense in your private life (although I highly doubt I’m going to come off of my position here); what I think is even less debatable is that having separate identities for your private life and work life is not just healthy, but also a vastly superior product experience. We just saw Microsoft realize that Copilot for both professional and personal lives was a mistake, and double down on the former; that Meta is risking the possibility of owning the latter to pursue the former, with literally no reason to think they might succeed other than what I believe to be a mistaken understanding of human nature, is crazy to me. Muse is cute and fun; why would you want to associate that with work, and intermingle what you have to do with what you want to do?

The other steelman argument is that I am underestimating just how much all of this costs, both compute and also the R&D that undergirds Meta Superintelligence Labs. We know that you can make money in enterprise selling AI; maybe Zuckerberg feels that it would be fiscally irresponsible to not chase those dollars given how much he is spending. I can see the logic in that, but the unfortunate reality is that initiatives based on solipsistic justifications like rationalizing spending are unlikely to end well, especially when they are a bad idea.

All of that noted, I am somewhat more encouraged by this morning’s announcement of Muse for Small Business; that is a much more natural extension of Meta’s actual advantages, and as a small business owner, I can certainly see the extent to which private and professional life can intermingle. Start there, though, and see if growing up makes sense; going for enterprise now is a mistake.

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