O2O, or the All-Too-Common Metaverse

Offline operators are shackled by policy and systems.
Online operators obsess over on-screen UX.

You'll get to Seoul either way, but --
The former tends to show excessive affection for people, especially internal customers, and often ends up fixated on short-term results. Because only if you can cover the store, factory, and labor costs right now, can you operate next month.
The latter treats objective data and indicators as essentials. At a glance, being objective sounds fair. But "objective" and "fair" don't sit on the same layer as words. Chasing the economic side objectively, innovators don't have the bandwidth to care about the existing values or universal ethics that hold society up, and they try any way they can to change anything that obstructs innovation. Because what determines the survival of a "one-click payment" service is, in the end, a fight about time (timing, the trigger at just the right moment).

But in the end, isn't it a person -- me -- using what's being built?
Just as people driving a bigger or more expensive car often become more aggressive as if they themselves had become that car --
the people working at that famous service or industry treat themselves as if they were the thing itself --
just as any driver eventually gets out of the car and steps onto the ground, managers and team members of any service or industry will, sooner or later, experience it as a user or consumer.

For both the former and the latter, approaching and recognizing users' essential needs is not easy. Even when they do barely recognize them, there's no clear path, so they just proceed regardless.

Which is why learning, career, and academic background -- and the pride (cartel) and expert self-regard those bring -- become even more poisonous.


You might wonder why I keep talking about people while invoking the metaverse, but it's not really a digression. In many cases, the real issue isn't a technical limit but whether the industry, society, and institutions can accept it; and the truly decisive factor is often the internal calculus of costs and stomach.

Problem-solving is something you can do one way or another. It's a matter of money, effort, will, and time.
Problem-recognition is different. You can't change it with money, with will -- not even with time.
You can pretend; you can put on a convincing front; but you cannot truly do it.

O2O, or the all-too-common metaverse, is the mutual relationship between offline subjects through the medium of online.

What it takes to build something useful
is, in the end, culture. That culture is built when the frames of each member accumulate through tacit agreement, without anyone really noticing.

So to realize O2O, or the all-too-common metaverse, what matters more than anything is the balance among the people -- the team -- and the org chart.



No matter how beautifully a designer makes clothes, if buyers don't wear them well, or coordinate them terribly, the beauty no longer serves any purpose, however astonishing it might be.
Services are no different.

We need to step down from the throne of "expert."
At most it lasts ten years.
Even the vaunted "Naver-Kakao-Line-Coupang-Baemin" have already gone too far.
In some respects, haven't they become even more conservative and unethical than legacy industries?

We need to be humbler.
And in the end, I am also a user, a customer -- a person. Let's not forget that.