I can't speak for the accuracy of these predictions, but I welcome Zuckerberg to kill his company. The tone of this post seems like alarm or indignation but the death of Facebook (or whatever its named today) is a celebratory event not something to cause apprehension.
Him burning down his company for any reason is kind of a baller move and fun to watch, but honestly, I think the metaverse play is going to pay off. People are just confused because they don't understand that isn't not really a video game. It might not work, but he's not broke. He has all the control. It's his company. I am not a Zuck booster at all, but yeah. Fuck Fb and all that social shit. I don't trust him at all. But yeah, do something interesting, burn all your capital trying to do something different. You don't see behavior like that out of big operations often.
There's a ready-made textbook solution for a company that can't make efficient use of its cash:
Return it to the shareholders, and let them find their own efficient use for it.
i.e. pay a dividend. Yes, he would be paying a lot of it to himself, but maybe his personal investment staff can put it to use for him.
Most corporate managers would rather set their money on fire than pay a dividend. MZ is no different. Normally a hostile takeover would fix that problem, but he's got himself so wedged in there with the voting shares that a takeover may be impossible.
1. On the basis of how much you expect a bigger sucker than yourself to pay for it.
2. On the basis of yield on your investment, aka dividend / share multiplied by some "reasonable" number, e.g. 15 which implies 7% interest rates.
Since there seems to be fewer gullible investors, on the basis of dividend earnings, Meta is worth exactly zero. Time to pay a dividend or burn the cash. Which to even gullible investors looks bad.
It's not decades. That's ludicrous. Actually those glasses exist, they just are lacking in field of view or some 3d tracking abilities. Such as the new Spectacles.
There is no reason to think it will take two decades to increase the field of view.
It would need to last at least 4-5 hours and probably have a 5G modem. I don't see that happening any time soon. That's to say nothing of the software side.
I saw AR glasses the other day (forget where) that looked almost normal, but were like $4000. The glasses are only half the issue, the other half is the CPU power required to drive them. How does a 4lb fanny pack look and feel?
It won't take that long. Maybe making the glasses more like a dumb terminal while the actual processing happens on a larger wearable device will allow for regular looking AR glasses to become a reality much sooner than that.
Who knows what will happen, but AR/VR/MR seems like a sensible big bet to me.
People don't get it because the headsets are big and uncomfortable and the graphics aren't very impressive or realistic. But they are getting better.
I think that is someone comes along in the next few years with something like the new Spectacles but with a 90 degree field of view and less than $500, it could become extremely popular.
Or suppose next year an Apple headset has an application with very realistic graphics for mixed reality or VR "teleporting" where realistic faces and bodies appear in your house. Or you go to some club or something and it looks completely realistic.
To me this stuff will take off when the graphics and software get a bit better, better field of view, cheaper. But it's a matter degrees at this point.
What could very well happen is that AR/MR completely blows up in the next three years, but with some other company making a slightly better and cheaper glasses or whatever and a totally open metaverse platform. That will prove that he was going in the right direction, but no one will admit they misjudged the goal.
I've been a proponent of VR for 30 years and have noticed that there is strong resistance to it, not because of clunky headsets or field of view or graphics quality. The objection seems to derive more from concerns of a Matrix style world, where one company controls a form of reality where people spend significant time. And the control really is complete, the worst dictatorship is nothing compared to the control the owner of a virtual reality has. I have no proof, but my suspicion is that this is why people in power object to the very idea of virtual reality, it usurps their power. You could say facebook or twitter or Youtube are already like this, yet there is something different about an immersive environment, perhaps a suspension of disbelief because we generally accept what our senses tell us as real. VR is closer to a direct channel into peoples brains than text or video is. It is a synthetic reality. If a bat flies towards you in a video you do not duck, in a VR environment you may very well duck.
The post spends a lot of words circling the core point without engaging it directly.
The point, IMHO, is: like Genghis Khan, Zuckerberg is an empire conqueror rather than an empire maintainer (*). Everything MZ built up to now has been unreservedly secondary and reactive with respect to a preexisting state of things. To his credit, MZ was able to untap the full value where previous owners couldn't. But there was never a holistic vision how things should be in the steady state. At a personal level MZ seems to lack a lot of the skills necessary to keep the system going in steady state.
Now MZ claims that he sees a new area for conquest, but there's no preexisting kingdom there, just wilderness. He was never good at wilderness situations before, hence he's unlikely to succeed. The End.
Facebook/Instagram had already stagnated. They had so many users their products were just competing with each other. But investors want growth, so they were doomed already. I think Zuckerburg picked the right time, moving when the company was at peak valuation and pouring capital into R&D. I don't like the new Horizon junk, but I'm not convinced that Meta doesn't have enough cash to distort reality enough to make some kind of VR thing, a "thing". It's a gamble, but it's got better odds than doing nothing and fading away.
And VR is a risky bet. Many have tried investing in VR but failed. The difference is the deep pockets. As if somehow by having more dollars, that this makes VR 'better'. You need traction, and that means making it super cheap to participate. Not everyone can afford 1000$ headsets, they're too busy saving for the next iPhone.
Burn it to the ground