During covid, my manager (also personal friend) was legitimately excited about trying out the “metaverse” to have meetings. Never before in my life have I immediately lost so much respect and trust in someone. It still haunts me!
When I worked at Second Life we'd often have work meetings in-world. It was fun, often silly, but also productive. Ultimately, it was a voice conference with decent audio and tinker-toy visuals, and we could dogfood and demo our work.
But this was around 2010, when most internet video conferencing tools were still terrible, so Second Life was decent competition. For doing work meetings in 2025, the only virtual-world-like competition to Zoom & co that I can think of is maybe Apple's Spatial Facetime, and that's thanks to expensive hardware designed to solve or hide the usual VR usability issues.
