At Meta Connect 2022, the company’s annual developer conference for its VR efforts and Oculus hardware platform, the company announced a lot of stuff — but what it communicated more effectively than anything else was just how incredibly thirsty — one might even say desperate — Mark Zuckerberg is for his metaverse bet to pay off.No one’s disputing that, but Zuck’s overscripted and overproduced dev event keynote today was easily the hardest sell for not just a product or a platform, but the premise upon which it’s based, I can ever recall seeing in a decade in tech.Zuck covered all the old stand-bys — social, gaming, fitness and “future of work.” None looked significantly improved or capable of acting as a turning point in terms of mass adoption, and most had either vague or nonexistent ship dates.One of the biggest swings involved a partnership with Microsoft, which was jointly announced by Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella.The avatar itself was a big improvement from prior iterations; it was a fully animated version of the better-looking version Mark showed off after his much-mocked announcement of Horizon’s expansion to France and Spain."