Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sailing to oblivion.
Moreover we still don't know how entire VR game will play off given the technical arc. Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.
Their focus on making Facebook for mobile platforms was smart, their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard. By critical acquisitions I assume you mean Instagram and WhatsApp. Both were anti-competitive attempts to stave off becoming the next MySpace (but also successful). Everything else on the list of acquisitions looks like gambles that did not pay off.
Google, Microsoft, and Apple have never bet such a huge chunk of their spending on a single tech that has been so resoundingly mocked. The amount Meta is spending on VR makes the Windows phone look like a drop in the bucket. It's not that they are speculating on a moonshot, it's that they are wasting so much of their money on a single moonshot.
Apple's famously very secretive, so who knows what they've spent money on internally that has never seen the light of day.
There have been rumours for the last 10 years that a bunch of people are working on a self driving and/or electric car, with little to show for it so far. I doubt anyone outside a select few in the company would know how much.
I remember hearing that rumour when they were building a tech center in Yokohama. But all the job listings never mention anything related to self-driving so I always wondered what they actually do there.
They did a brief collaboration with HTC on a custom Android skin back in 2013 but that appears to have been their only major effort in the handheld device space.
This is wrong, I worked there at the time and a lot of people were working on the phone project. It got kind of scrapped before it saw the light of day though.
It's not particularly helpful to think of Apple before Jobs' return as iCEO and Apple afterward as the same company. His leadership philosophy and his vision for the company were so completely different than Gil Amelio and his fellow suits, any attempt to draw conclusions based on things that happened during that period is going to be an exercise in futility.
Unless, of course, all you want to do is score points dunking on Apple. Which has been a beloved pastime of many tech people for about 40 years now.
> their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard
Meta was in its infancy when the mobile hardware revolution was happening. Do you really think they stood a chance of creating their own hardware platform while simultaneously adapting their existing software platform to the new paradigm? According to a google search they had 850 employees in 2008. Apple had 32000.
> It's not that they are speculating on a moonshot, it's that they are wasting so much of their money on a single moonshot
And yet Google is constantly trounced on this very site for never committing and constantly shutting down promising products. Armchair critics will never be satisfied and Zuck is wise to ignore them.
> Do you really think they stood a chance of creating their own hardware platform while simultaneously adapting their existing software platform to the new paradigm?
Then they should have realised that it was a bad idea.
It's easy to look like a visionary leader when people will rewrite history for you. Facebook was famously late to mobile and almost missed the boat. Luckily, they had the resources to plow into catching up around 2012.
I am talking about jumping to create a family of mobile apps that dominate the data day to day usage of mobile. They lost their chance of owning a mobile OS which they are suffering till now
Yes, that is what I was talking about. They were late creating a mobile presence for Facebook. Then of course, Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquisitions. Definitely good acquisitions, but pretty obvious ones. They luckily had plenty of money at the time to plow into the already successful Insta and WhatsApp mobile apps.
IIRC the Facebook "mobile app" was originally just a glorified webview that was slow and didn't integrate well with the native experience. It took them a couple years to fix most things.
And their UI (mobile and web) still suck for lesser used features to this day. Not the "doesn't look good" kind of suck, but "they forgot to put in the submit button" kind suck.
They own the mobile platforms because they blazed the trail as you put it.
That was the prize they were competing for, Meta was late with the HTC First / Facebook phone, and so they lost.
Of course they would have liked to own their own little mobile fiefdom, they are incredibly valuable platforms
Palm, Blackberry and Windows PocketPC blazed the trail. iOS and Android were relatively latecomers that arrived with a more competitive product (iOS because it was much better than the previous generation, and Android because it borrowed the ideas from iOS and was free.)
I honestly don't think there is a room for a third commercial mobile platform, after Apple started the smartphone market, and Google caught up soon enough after. Even strong and entrenched players like Palm, Nokia (with Tizen) and even BlackBerry could not hold.
In 2007, Facebook was way, way less mighty, and by 2012, it was late.
Speaking of Windows Phone: it had great hardware and good, innovative software. It's Microsoft's bureaucratic ineptitude that killed it, not its (possible lack of) merit.
Windows Mobile was more advanced compared to the initial iPhone in almost every way (to be fair it wasn't a particularly useful device on launch). Of course the whole is more than just a sum of it's parts.
> Even strong and entrenched players like Palm, Nokia (with Tizen) and even BlackBerry could not hold.
What do you mean Nokia with Tizen? Tizen was Samsung's attempt at continuing with Linux after Nokia abandoned MeeGo.
Nokia was the massive smartphone market leader with Symbian, but was a hardware company at heart and couldn't keep up with Android which ate its lunch by giving all the competitors a free, competitive operating system.
Before Android came along the competition didn't really have much choice as they were even worse at software than Nokia was. Who knows, without Android the landscape might still today be Nokia & Apple sharing the market -- or maybe Windows Phone would've managed to become the second system.
Was it really Microsoft that killed Windows phone? Or was it simply just too late. By the time it was really available I'm not sure there was actually a chance for a third platform to survive.
They were too early, and then too late. CE and Mobile just never had devices with enough processing power or good enough hardware UI to make them viable and enticing for developers.
In retrospect, after understanding more about tech history, I suspect the leadership of Steve Ballmer during the vital period in the late 2000s and Bill Gates' spending less time on Microsoft probably had something to do with this as well.
According to reported stories, Bill used to be really good at understanding how to squeeze the last drop of performance from slow hardware, a vital skill to have in the 1980s, yet subsequently became less important when desktops became fast enough. If they had Bill Gates leading the technical direction of the mobile OSes, the extra focus on speed optimization might have been what would have allowed Microsoft to do better during the smartphone wars.
Their versioning seemed like a big problem and caused a loss of faith in the platform. They had an incompatible version jump and then another odd thing going on around the next version.
Not sure if you were using Facebook in 2012/2013 but their implementation was horrendous. Everyone bemoaned its lack of true mobile first design while other apps were responsive and sleek.
His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning
Wha? This is revisionist history.
Facebook was very late to having a mobile app. It was widely ridiculed for a very long time for not having an iPhone app, and when it did finally get one, it was so bad that it was practically unusable for at least two years.
I remember a number of friends and family members giving up on Facebook because its app was so slow, bad, and buggy, even on the newest phones. My wife upgraded to a new phone just because the Facebook app was so awful, and she was so disappointed to find out that the problem wasn't the phone, it was Facebook.
I have friends that got married, never had kids, and spend large chunks of their free time in MMORPGs, League of Legends, and a seemingly endless array of virtual-based entertainment. They also seem to get a lot of personal meaning and satisfaction from nerd pop culture like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings which is evidence that their rich fantasy lives have such deep meaning for them.
So I find it totally plausible that a huge amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world, provided it wasn’t clunky and caused headaches.
> So I find it totally plausible that a huge amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world
I, on the other hand, know nobody that uses virtual worlds. I find it plausible that a tiny amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world. I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.
>I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.
there are 2.5 billion adult gamers in the world. A good percentage of that are partaking in games that easily qualify as virtual worlds.
no personal anecdote needed, huge amounts of people are already spending time in places that qualify as virtual worlds.
Our interfaces are clunky, and you can shift 'virtual world' around to mean something else, but it feels evident to me that this isn't an uncommon pastime/desire among people.
> there are 2.5 billion adult gamers in the world.
I don't think casually playing a mobile game every once in a while translates to going full VR. The amount of gamers that care enough about the medium to buy a console or gaming PC is only around 500 million or so.
I'm an adult gamer, and I also own a Valve Index VR kit.
VR is fun, but has serious limitations. A nice way to take a walk on the rings of Saturn, but no way in hell am I going to trust it with my privacy. And it's totally overkill for something like scrolling cat-meme videos or wishing someone happy birthday via social media.
Plus the Index is pretty good but it still gives me headaches and dizziness after extended periods.
I absolutely think there is more to come with VR, but it's only after there is already a flourishing ecosystem that social media will find its place there, not before.
You're making a giant unsubstantiated leap from "there are 2.5 adult billion gamers in the world" and the idea that the current types of "virtual worlds" means that a significant number of these folks want anything resembling the metaverse.
I am one of those "adult gamers". I even occasionally play VR games with an Oculus Quest. The thought of living substantially more portions of my life "in the metaverse" is pretty much the definition of dystopia for me. I've seen Wall-E, and I'll pass, thanks.
I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.
But people already do.
Email, Facebook, twitter, messaging, slack, all of it, is by no means real, human interaction. It is a step away from that.
Some even say that this type of interaction is so fake, so filled with disinformation, and algorithmic monkeying, that it is toxic poison.
Yet people will be with friends at a restaurant, or hanging out, and so addicted, so unable to stop, that they are constantly be staring at their screen instead of interacting in person!
People cannot help themselves, and people cannot resist addictive platforms.
So sadly, Zuck probably has a good idea. He's probably a bit early, but you can be sure when VR takes a Musk implant, and a simple pair of glasses for full immersion, people will be in VR while having lunch with you.
It’s a huge jump from what you mentioned rather than a “small step away.” (I see you edited your post, but I’m sticking with the original quote) Everything you mentioned can be done in short spurts of time and interwoven with other parts of someones life. VR as it stands today is way too burdensome and all consuming to pull that off. I’m not even getting into the additional hardware costs.
Jaron Lanier made an incisive point many years ago. Someone asked him what virtual reality was. "Virtual reality is where you are when you're on the telephone."
I'd extend that to, "Virtual reality is where you are when you're not present in the here-and-now." That encompasses all forms of media, entertainment, and communication with people who aren't in the room with you. The idea that it has anything to do with goggles, 3D graphics, avatars, or Facebook is something some people made up.
I can see the point in Lanier argument, however there is a much bigger problem for VR: There is no VR analog to Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube and Co. VR is still very much an activity in which you have to actively engage, you have to find a game that is interesting, load it up and play. You can't just casually doom-scroll in VR and have the algorithm find interesting content for you. There is no app for that. And the retention rates of VR aren't great either, as once you are done with a game, it's quite difficult to find whatever you'll do next.
For all the hype around Metaverse and Zuckerberg wanting 1 billion people in VR, there has been surprisingly little effort in finding out what those people would actual do when they have the headset on.
Games like Gorilla Tag and VRChat have tens of millions of monthly users. They are on a hardware devices that give most people nausea after 30 mins. Meta has the most popular hardware by far. Seems huge
I take the entire breadth of my lived experience when trying to predict the future, and I place high value on anecdata. My strategies have served me well thus far, but if you want to outsource all of your thinking to “experts”, good luck to you.
You don't need to "outsource all of your thinking to experts" to understand that data is not the plural of anecdote.
I, too, know people who met their future spouse online. However, after meeting online, they invariably meet in person before getting married, and then live together after getting married. Even the most plugged-in exemplars of the metaverse can't escape from the desire to interact outside of it.
And yet, while HN places zero trust in anecdata and personal observation, it it critical in real life decision-making. Most mega-successful entrepreneurs got there by trusting their instincts, not disregarding their own observations and instead only ever searching for studies conducted by others.
So while I agree with your point overall, I think here on HN we're too quick to dismiss people's personal stories.
I sold my Quest 2 because I rarely ever used after initial honeymoon period. It was clunky and required too much preparation before put it on.
But I am looking forward to Quest 3. Because I really miss the part of completely shutting off from my surroundings and being transported elsewhere. And really enjoyed random conversations in Table Tennis game and in their VR World thing.
Only after selling it, I realized how much those few minutes in it were worth.
EDIT: Now I think VR/meta is correct long term move.
That's exactly my feeling, I have a valve index and got my parents a quest. It's still new technology, it's still clunky but it will get better and I've had really amazing moments with VR.
I think the Meta beta is correct long term. It might be too early right now but I think long term, it's the correct move
If my friends and I are socializing in VR, it's not exactly shut off from the world. Anyway Hololens and Apple's upcoming XR glasses don't block out the world in the first place.
100 years ago people would have said the same about having the internet in your house and using the computer of an evening.
In the future, if everything you care about is in VR, then not being in VR would be shutting yourself off from the world, the same as not using the internet is shutting oneself off from the world today (for some of us).
A future where "everything that you care about is in VR" describes a hellish dystopia. Even in a future where humans spend large amounts of time in virtual spaces, our meat bodies still appreciate going for walks in the park.
The average American spends something like 3 hours per day watching TV, and upwards of 6 hours of total screen time, according to a quick Google search. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine a world where the screens we use are part of a head-mounted display?
Think about any time you've been on a bus, train or plane -- most people on board are using their phones or tablets. I suspect within this decade it's common for those devices to be supplanted by AR/VR headsets.
To the defence of VR, most of the experiences encourage standing up and moving. Whereas laptops, desktop monitors, phones are back / neck / arm-killing machines, as ergonomics are the last thing companies are thinking about and customer does not really care until they start having health problems.
To be fair Meta's VR headsets are pretty heavy, which is also bad for the neck, but evolutional pressure will bring the futures headsets' weight down, as ergonomics is on a critical path for these devices adoption.
A future where "everything that you care about is in VR" describes a hellish dystopia
Isn't that the way it is now? Used to be, you'd all get together at the town hall, to discuss problems with the city.
Now people use twitter and Facebook, and community involvement is at an all time low.
We're already in VR version 1. Nothing online is "real"!
In VR2 people will still go for walks in the park, but just as now, where everone is walking and staring at their phone, people will be in VR2 while walking their dog.
I quit social media in 2012 (including FB properties like Whatsapp), but I'm still active on many forum/aggregator sites like Reddit and HN
Ten years in I def feel like I've cut myself off from the world in a significant way. I feel like my Boomer parents now, seeing local events advertised in traditional media instead of on Facebook or in some feed.
The _major_ upside is that I am pretty out of the loop with so much meme-based misinformation and influence. It's crazy to see what people are consuming daily.
I just really hope that VR doesn't go the same way. The 90s cyberpunk vision was you'd jack into this wild west and have access to everything. The current reality is that you're just getting another Marc Zuckerberg-esque curated reality. Thanks but no thanks.
That's solvable, just add proper stereo pass-through cameras to turn the VR headset into an AR headset. The Lenovo Mirage Solo[1] had that four years ago, due to the death of the whole Daydream platform it didn't see much use outside of YoutubeVR, but there it works great. You just hit a button and you can see the world around you while watching Youtube.
Quest2 has been adding similar functionality over the last year, though the image quality of the pass-through still leaves a lot to be desired, but that can be fixed in future headsets.
Depths sensors will also make they way into headsets sooner or later and allow much more flexible integration between real world and virtual objects. Hololens could do that years ago, but the VR space still needs to do some catch up.
No, the problem is you can't really move in the VR environment with current-generation products, so that ruins the illusion. But I think Apple is on the right track in betting on AR rather than VR.
Meta's other problem is that while it owns an overwhelming share of VR headsets thanks to subsidies, it is a pitiful also-ran in services with Horizon compared to the real leaders, Fortnite and Minecraft.
> Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.
How many decades and hardware cycles does it take for this prediction to go away? Billions has been poured into VR and it's still as much a novelty and fad as ever.
Industry titans can still make mistakes and it's important to recognise them. The examples you give are decades old. I agree that VR may yet turn around but at the moment needs dictate a pivot in focus.
> Moreover we still don't know how entire VR game will play off
I'm not sure it even matters as it appears the game was really a way to find a funding stream for future hardware development to get them where they really want to go. Kind of like how Netflix mailed DVDs around until they could achieve their goal of a streaming service.
> Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.
They already achieved something like a 10x cost reduction with the Quest in a few HW generations.
I think their worse mistake was tying up Oculus devices to Facebook accounts. Oculus should have stayed a separate platform with minimal ties to Facebook with it's own social features.
How requiring a Facebook account to use Oculus was their worst mistake? I get it that a few people might be bothered by that, but most people don't care.
It’s a story that could have gone in different directions. Mostly Facebook was lucky to be in the right time and place and didn’t have an entrenched competitor. You could have the kind of brain Eliezer Yudkowsky is afraid of and try to start Facebook in 2023 and fail, fail, fail.
Sheryl Sandburg deserve a huge amount of credit for making Facebook a sustainable business, something Zuck floundered at previously.
A person who could brilliantly take advantage of a an opportunity once might have no generalizable talent to create another opportunity out of thin air.
I completely agree with this and i believe lots of innovation in meta is happening here. The biggest reason for VR not taking off is the VR world at present looks funny and old like 90s video games and headset is heavy and clunky.
This can change completely if they can increase the resolution of headset, make them 3x lighter and with jaw dropping graphics created by generative AI streamed from cloud.
That's the thing I am aghast it has not yet percolated through the tech commentorship. The AI advances of yesterday completely have turned upside down the VR/AR/XR equation. (Note the use of past tense)
Meta isn't investing billions into VR alone. They're also investing billions into AR, metaverse, etc. Read their filings & earnings report; it's all in there.
The funny part is, if they actually invested more on investing in VR, they might actually get to AR faster.
In the long run AR will be subsumed by VR (by having cameras and displaying the real world within the VR experience, with whatever augmentations dictated by the software).
I agree. There has been tremendous whiplash in the markets. We went from free money and “new paradigms” to QT belt tightening and broken dreams. If people think they could lead better than Zuck, they should start a company and beat him.
There has to be some incredible lag in the news media, to be reporting this at this time when Meta managed to almost triple its stock price in less than a year. Meta beat all analyst estimates in its earnings call, whatever Meta is doing it’s working. My only regret is not investing enough into Meta when it was 90$ (Now it’s 240$)
> at this time when Meta managed to almost triple its stock price in less than a year
What are you talking about? Meta stock is up 14% from a year ago, down 26% from two years ago. It was last at a third of its current price eight years ago.
Edit: Oh, I get it. You're selectively measuring from its low point six months ago - when it had fallen 75% from its 2021 peak.
Prediction: generative AI is going to obviate the status signaling value of social media and quickly render it a pointless exercise, with attendant attrition. People are severely underestimating the impending psychological impact of social media achieving essentially the apotheosis of frictionless fakery. Meta is in huge trouble and so are its investors.
Cutting workforce to boost margins is MBA management 101. Every exec does this, for precisely the sentiment in your comment: it makes shareholders think the CEO is a genius.
> Ambitious managers could move up the ladder by proposing projects requiring them to spin up a new team or claim a departing manager’s direct reports. These climbers were privately called “empire builders”...
Same at Apple (and same term) when they were flying high after the iPhone success.
Apple began that insane period though (perhaps beginning around 2001 or so with the iPod introduction) after having wandered in the desert for half a decade, having nearly gone out of business.
In hindsight the circling-the-drain of the late 90's was a good experience for Apple — gave them focus, clarity. Or perhaps that was just due to Jobs returning and bringing his own focus and clarity to the company.
Regardless, Facebook has only seen up, up, up.
Perhaps all tech companies need a bit of sobering (sobriety?) to pull them back to reality.
Isn’t that always the case? Management and Administration are the two things that latch on to any organization, bloat it, introduce inefficiencies and then create a career out of trying to solve those inefficiencies.
They ultimately don’t solve them because the way they try to solve it is by hiring more people.
I can't take this article seriously. They are having a hard time hiring in 2022-2023 because of the scandal of 2016?? Facebook remains one of the TOP landing spots for any engineer still. The rep might be tarnished a bit, but you would be doing yourself a disservice if your company wouldn't consider an engineer with 2-5 years of senior SWE experience from FB. EVEN after the stock downturn it remains near the top in prestige and compensation -- though admittedly they are hiring a lot less and firing a lot more.
I think traditional journalism fails hard when covering tech because tech moves and evolves so quickly and this journalist in particular tries to weave a multi-year story that isn't as connected (or the threads they have chosen aren't) as it seems.
Both with Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Move fast and break things" the media got what they wanted, a nice sound bite that was (at least for a time) the motto of the company. Things change, companies evolve, the "risky" projects are more expensive, the failures are magnified (Google+, FB Phone, etc.) so companies themselves change. I don't think its fair to keep holding them to an ethos that hasn't/doesn't scale.
I don't know, I'm just tired of all these hit pieces on Meta/Zuckerberg. At least they have discipline (sharp revenue focus), conviction (betting on AI + metaverse), and focus (flatter structure than other peer companies even before the pandemic bloat) -- a lot more than I can say for a majority of tech companies these days...
Definitely agree that this kind of media narrative is ChatGPT-level of arbitrary free association that leads to completely nonsensical conclusions. You're also right that FB is still a strong resume signal. That said, I think FAANG reputation has been slowly diluting for a while, and significantly diluted from the over-hiring during the pandemic. The bottom line is the hiring process creates a floor in terms of raw coding ability, but says very little about their ability to drive impact in companies with a lesser warchest of technical talent. The average FAANG engineer is standing on the shoulders of giants at best, and coasting at worst. Being able to deal with a large technical bureaucracy is probably the most consistently reliable signal that a FAANG tenure gives you, but that's not what most hiring managers at companies with lesser tech brand recognition are actually looking for. They're probably imagining something like the scrappiness of folks that built Google from 2000-2005, or Facebook from 2005-2010. Of course those folks still exist, but they're a lot thinner on the ground relative to the massive headcount they have today.
100% agree that the gleam of a FAANG engineer is more lackluster these days. From the well-known bureaucracy, the wealth of internal tools, and slower release cycles, engineers from FAANG are sometimes a liability to a startup/smaller company. I think though they remain above average engineers who IF they are able to pivot back into execution mode and integrate well are still worth it (and by worth it I mean going a little above your comp band to hire them).
+1 to your point that FAANG tenure is probably best for Series C/D startups who need someone who has experience in big teams.
I've turned Facebook every time when they come calling for my engineering talents. I don't want to work for a person like Zuckerberg, and 2016 is one of many reasons why. I don't care how much they would pay me, other companies that aren't as evil pay as much. And no, I don't consider Facebook on someone's resume to mean anything. They hired too many inexperienced devs just like Google did, and then dumped them just as quickly. It doesn't mean as much as you think it does to work for FB.
>I don't know, I'm just tired of all these hit pieces on Meta/Zuckerberg.
If Zuck didn't suck so much, you wouldn't see all these "hit pieces". He's not a target because he's rich, he's a target because of the things he's actually done that are evil.
I don't like Zuck - because he has no 'taste' and only cares about power - he even tries to model himself after Roman emperors. If we talk about VR, I would compare Zuck to Nolan Sorrento in Ready Player One.
He's trying to build the next big (and only) platform and extract as much value out of it. Zero actual vision for a massive virtual world and what it could mean for society. He isn't a James Halliday.
Do you have an overview of the top 'evil' things he / FB has done?
Our leadership had no vision beyond doubling down on VR and doing a complete copy and paste of TikTok. Meanwhile our middle managers hired as many people as possible to justify their own promotions, as everyone is too lazy to consider impact beyond # of reports and there's no accountability. Finally, due to the above, we laid off many ICs.
In megacap tech you can have VPs that are 4 levels down in the reporting hierarchy. What I meant though was around how headcount is requested. I've seen my share of empire builders and been told to file and pad out HC requests even when I stated we didn't need it.
Requests don’t make growth. Don’t redirect responsibility and perpetuate the illusion that poor VPs at the top were deceived.
People love to avert responsibility and many seem to be loving the idea that Zuck somehow was deceived into over hiring by ruthless middle managers but anyone who worked in that place knew Mark is a control freak and absolutely everything in the place was top down.
Top management is being paid too dollars for being responsible given how easy it is to create a narrative of a runaway middle manager situation, it seems to me that most people don’t understand the meta game in the US
The meta game isn’t work hard and make a lot of money. It’s not even about money - it’s about no responsibility and the power to do anything that comes with it.
The US system has created a world where consequences are for normal people. Elon at the time could molest all of Austin Texas, spend the same coin he spent on the flight attendant and still have more money than 99.9% of Americans.
Almost everything is legal for a fee. All top level lieutenants at FB got Exceeds or Greatly Exceeds for their loyalty, everyone else got fired. And even HN loves to propagate the insane idea that the cause of the fuckup was rooted in Middle Management and by ruthless employees who sat around all day.
Not really sure what you mean by ‘get away with’. Journalists are obliged to ask companies to comment and spokespeople make those comments. The spokesman doesn’t get interviewed or grilled and it is generally left to the reader to interpret the comment and decide if the spokesperson has ‘gotten away with it’.
Do you have the same reaction whenever an organisation has a scandal and they ‘don’t want to comment on an ongoing investigation’?
Yes. When Donald Trump says something like "As we all know Sleepy Joe Biden eats babies for breakfast", reputable journalistic sources will print it, and will have a sentence somewhere down the line that says "According to the FBI, there is no evidence that Joe Biden consumes human flesh.
Likewise, when a tech C-suite exec makes vague references to macroeconomic conditions, a reputable journalist would include a sentence like "Although rising interest rates have dampened venture capitalist investment into new startups hurting the growth and creation of billion-dollar valuations, the Big Tech companies including Meta have demonstrated continued growth and record profits quarter after quarter, yet still chose to undertake a policy of layoffs self-referencing each other as justification."
It seems like the argument that it's false is harder than that to make. Could changes in direction, including expense cutting and layoffs, have anything to do with renewed profits?
There's more to making an convincing argument than putting two contrasting things side by side and letting the audience assume it proves something.
To be fair the planned 3Q23 artificial recession produced by the fed is fairly well known and the proactive layoffs just in case are reverberating through tech.
>“What was special about Meta was the trust. We drank the Kool-Aid and really felt like it was our company [and] even willingly defended it when everyone said we were evil incarnate,” one current employee said. “But that’s been shattered, so it feels like a betrayal.”
So as long as we're getting paid to be evil, we're ok with that, but when the total disregard for other people is directed at us, well we're upset.
For me the big turning point at Meta was the acquisition of Oculus. At the time, it was great, forward-thinking and gave everyone a lot of hope for the future of Meta and even society if you believed the hype. This peaked at about 2020 when the opportunity for VR and remote work became real and necessary due to an unprecedented pandemic.
However, we all know the rest; hyperfocus on VR to the detriment of the rest of the company (most notably Instagram missing out on short-form video content) leading to the gradual slide off the cliff. VR is still important but Zuck needs to radically reshift and refocus to save the farm and stave off OpenAI. Interesting few years ahead.
Is there any kind of indication VR (or its cousin, AR) is important to any extent? Everything I know suggests it's a niche technology that has little chance of becoming anything but a niche technology. It's not made any significant headway in gaming, in entertainment of other kinds, nor in general business settings.
There are some specialist domains where 3D visualization is worth the cost and inconvenience, but it seems to me very unlikely that it will ever escape those. Meta's gigantic investment with little to show for it seems to me to support this observation.
I've been a strong advocate for VR since 2016. Over the last 6+ years I've managed to convince family and friends to all jump in and pickup VR, mostly the Quest 2.
What I can say is, the vast majority of them don't use their headset at all anymore. It sits on a shelf collecting dust, out of batteries, only to be picked up on the extremely rare occasion where they want to try it out again, and then after about 30-45 minutes they're done and it goes back on the shelf for another 3 months.
I've lost all hope for VR being anything other than a niche technology, and I am a member of this small group that finds it a fascinating and very fun technology. I'm willing to put up with the inconvenience and discomfort because the experiences are so much more visceral. But I have to now accept that for most people the experience isn't amazing enough to overcome the discomfort and hassle.
Most people will acknowledge that it's pretty cool in theory. If they could just flip a switch and be suddenly transported into their game world of course they'd do that every time v.s. playing on a flat monitor. Physical discomfort clunky controls and unintuitive interfaces, etc. all plague VR and make it only accessible to the most dedicated of fans.
It’s still early. Within 10 years, I’d be surprised if headsets and software haven’t improved enough that it’s reached a tipping point where many more people do use it consistently.
I sure hope so. VR right NOW is amazing and fun, so if it becomes more accessible, comfortable, and standardized, I think it has a chance at breaking into the mainstream. It's going to take some serious electrical and hardware engineering though to get the form factor small and comfortable enough that people don't find it a huge pain.
Damn, hits home. I would've been one of your friends or family I think.
I was immediately excited about VR back in the mid 2010s. And over the past years I've done a bit of reading and have had various fun discussions with friends about the use-cases of VR today, and in 5 or 15 years from now, that all made sense to me.
I really held off as long as I could for both the tech and the content base to develop, to jump in with the best experience. Plus I had already moved away from gaming PCs to Mac + PlayStation, so when 1.5y ago PSVR2 was announced I had an opportunity to get some of the best hardware $550 could buy.
But I've mostly been disappointed. Despite waiting for half a decade to jump into it, and staying home looking out the window for my package to arrive, I spent just 30 min on it the first day, and another 30min over the course of the next week, and since I got it (pre-order) I've spent no more than 1.5 hours. I honestly don't think I've ever in my life, spent so much on something that got me so little value.
I'm not really blaming the hardware, it's all quite impressive, and I've been on the PSVR2 subreddit where everyone absolutely loves a ton of the games. It just didn't get the magic going for me.
I'm still considering selling the PSVR2 and buying a Quest 2. I'm personally less interested in the PS game content, and want to try out museums, concerts, safaris, as well as some indie (game) content and the various mods. I'm still somehow quite excited about the tech, even though I've got no interest in using the hardware I have sitting a meter away from me.
And I have to be honest, the nausea of the 3 experiences I had were a put off. Traumatic is waaaay too strong a word to use. But you know how someone may eat sushi and love it, and then get food poisoning due to bad hygiene at the restaurant, and spend 24 hours throwing up sushi, doesn't feel like having sushi for years? I feel the nausea may have had that effect a bit. All 3 play sessions I ended feeling sweaty, dizzy and sick, and required me to just lay down and do nothing for a few hours. I know it gets better as your brain gets used to it, but it raised the bar to jump in for a quick session to the point of 'why bother'. My gf didn't have this problem at all, although she hasn't asked to play since the first time I showed it to her (and she was really wowified by it all and enjoyed it a lot).
I've definitely come to the conclusion that my enthusiasm for VR was misguided, or just really premature. I don't see myself videoconferencing in VR in 5 years rather than using Teams, playing games, watching VR movies from the POV of one of the main actors, watching the world cup final from the POV of the referee, enjoying a concert from the VIP area, or playing a VR RPG like Fallout or Mass Effect with not just a ChatGTP but also a VR mod.
But who knows. Part of me does still think: if there's tons of good content out there, cheaper than now. If the devices have double the resolution and screen refresh rate, weigh less, cost less, and they're super seamless to put on and make you less dizzy, immerse you more, and get you into experiences that flatscreens can't do... then maybe it'll stay around like the Smartwatch / Apple Watch: a major ($100b per year) product category enjoyed by >200 million, that doesn't change the world but still makes it better. I don't really see VR fading away entirely, unless AR supplants it.
Could you speak to your top 5 or 10 (if you can) VR apps/experiences on the Quest 2, that you would recommend to try out?
You actually fit the bill - almost exactly - to a friend of mine who returned his Quest 2 just a few weeks ago. He was so excited for it to arrive that he took the day off of work just to be sure he was there to receive the package.
He spend a total of about 2 hours in it before deciding it was not for him. Frankly, I respect his decision because that's better than leaving it on the shelf for months and months like most of my other friends.
I agree with you that someday VR may reach a point where the barrier-to-entry is low enough to captivate the general public. If you ask me, comfort is the #1 issue. People's issues range from nausea, to face discomfort, to (if im being honest) straight up laziness and/or disability. Some people would rather binge netflix on a couch for 3 hours than stand up in a room physically moving around.
If Meta can't fix the comfort issues, I pretty much never see VR breaking out of it's niche following. It's got to somehow get to a level where it's as comfortable and convenient as sitting on a couch. Long, long way to go.
Anyways, my top VR experiences is an easy list to assemble. I use my VR for games so... not sure there will be an intersection with your interests since you mention museums and such, but here it is:
For a brief moment during 2020, you could see the hype actually meet reality when a wave of VR startups that promised to transport us "as if we were really there" to the office. Now, you can choose to be cynical about that but I think it genuinely did live up to the hype when I could remote in to a full infinite-screen workstation and interact much more freely with coworkers than a Zoom call.
These days, I see it much more commonly used for training purposes now that we are all being forced back to the office.
> Now, you can choose to be cynical about that but I think it genuinely did live up to the hype when I could remote in to a full infinite-screen workstation and interact much more freely with coworkers than a Zoom call.
How exactly did you interact more freely with co-workers? I fully agree that in-person meetings are more productive than Zoom calls, but true telepresence that would capture that requires far more than I've seen any VR setup come even close to provide. Especially since everyone is busy with the display, while the camera+microphone part is actually miles away.
I'm personally still excited to try it for doing actual work. I think we're nearly there in terms of technology. Oculus CV1 was too blurry to read text. The last factor will be all day comfort I think. I like the idea of infinite screen real estate and being able to play proper 3D content is very cool.
But.. I still admit not everyone will want to put on a headset even if the tech is great and I don't know how Zuck can change that perception.
> People are confusing bulky headsets with the general concept of VR.
True, and it's still entirely reasonable to criticize Facebook on this count, because they have absolutely no plans beyond VR headsets. Any technology to take VR to the next level isn't even a glimmer on the horizon; we are still decades too early.
That's not really true at all. Quest Pro is technically an AR headset with full color pass through. It's extremely limited to be sure, but it's not like meta is ignoring AR.
AR has more utility than VR , and i think telepresence requires elements of both.
AR could be used to visually aid a tire change, or display sales specials overlayed on visual of IRL signage
What counts as significant? 20m headsets sold on par with a gaming console at least counts for something. Have you actually tried the Quest 2 or Pro, it's pretty neat. Not an iphone moment yet, it seems it'll be a slower thing, like the PC or the internet.
Every time I see these numbers about how much Meta is losing per year on VR - 6 billion, 10 billion, etc. - I look up the valuation of Roblox.
Answer: about 20 billion.
They should’ve just acquired Roblox - for the price of WhatsApp! - and gotten unquestioned ownership of the leading young gamer audience, and a fully functioning “Metaverse” (if you want call it that), in one fell swoop.
It sounds like they’ve already spent more than this for nothing tangible in return. Such a missed opportunity.
The issue with that is that Meta doesn't really want a younger audience. Quest2 is already extremely popular with kids, but Meta's "age 13" requirement for accounts doesn't allow many of them on their platform. Their Horizon Worlds "Metaverse" even had an age 18 limit for the last few years (seems to have been lifted in the US just days ago, still present in most other countries).
Killing the Oculus name was another bad choice here. They were on their way to become the new "Nintendo". People started to refer to everything VR gaming related as "Oculus", but Facebook wanted VR to be about Metaverse, not gaming, so Oculus got killed.
Many of the alternate treatments were widely decried by medical professionals as being unsafe.
Much of the discourse which Facebook and others ended up deciding they didn’t want on their platforms was tied to (or related to, or resulted in) the criminal conduct at the U.S. Capitol which has resulted in 10’s of people being imprisoned, and with many more criminal investigations and prosecutions still underway.
I don’t see why these platforms shouldn’t be allowed and indeed expected to moderate extreme behavior, or the advocacy of and incitement to criminal activities, or the promotion of medically unsafe treatments during a pandemic.
If by “ended up deciding they didn’t want on their platform” you mean being told by the USG to remove it, and when they didn’t remove enough of it, the President called them mass-murderers and threatened to do something about it?
The arrests of Jan 6 protestors, you mean like the “QAnon Shaman” who was guided through the Capital by police and had that evidence illegally withheld by the prosecution, and then when the truth came out was released?
This is a Washington Post article. Instead they claimed it was “allowing disinformation in 2016” that contributed to problems - what a joke they are still trying to push that narrative.
VR will be huge for gaming and other more niche things, but AR will be what people use all day, every day in their lives. Meta is focused too much on VR when they are not a gaming company. They should be focused on AR. They will be playing catch up with Apple when Apple released their AR.
The applications of AR are obvious, but I don't think the technology to make it generally useful exists. You need a device which:
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1. Looks normal, or at least relatively normal. (I'm not actually convinced the "at least" part is sufficient.)
2. Is comfortable to wear for extended periods. (Not too heavy, not too much heat, etc.)
3. Has a battery which can last most of the day.
4. Has lenses which are transparent, but onto which images can be digitally superimposed.
5. Has enough computing power on-board to do the actual AR calculations and graphics rendering, or is able to wirelessly communicate with a phone with extremely low latency. (Note that for Meta specifically, the latter approach would still leave them reliant on Apple/Google.)
* Bonus points for handling prescription lenses somehow, lest you cut off a huge portion of the potential market!
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This is really hard! Modern computers are small, but they aren't nearly small enough to do #5 without ruining #1, much less #2. Nor are they power-efficient enough for #3.
It's great to want things, but outside of science fiction you need more than just a vision of how something could work, you need technology to make it happen.
Building a useful VR headset is not easy, but it is a lot easier. You don't need the battery to last all day (if you have any battery at all), and it's okay if the headset looks kind of stupid. You want the headset to be as comfortable as possible, but it's okay if it feels weighty after an hour or so. And because the headset can be bigger and heavier, you can also get away with shoving more computing power inside.
We'll see what Apple announces at WWDC, but I'm skeptical they will make more headway than Meta.
Playing devil's advocate: a lot of your requirements become easier if you allow for tethering to one or more devices on your belt, or even on a backpack, through a discreet cable behind the ear. The hardest part is probably #4 (the lenses and projector) combined with #1 (looking normal).
My initial reaction is "that cable would have to be pretty darn discreet"—but I suppose wired headphones became normalized enough. I feel like there's an inherent difference in level-of-weirdness when the cable is attached to something on your eyes versus your ears, but maybe culture would adapt. Personally, I wouldn't want to bet my company on it.
"About half" of Reality Labs spend is in AR R&D according to Bosworth. I'll be very interested to see what Apple brings to the table, but would not expect Meta to be playing catch up.
Mistakes happen, the bigger you are the bigger your mistakes. It’s a good reminder that we are all mortals here. Frankly based on how addicted almost everyone is to their cell phones and social media it was the natural move to make, I think meta fumbled the execution or was just too premature. AI is a great pivot. I think they will be fine.
simpleton view as a non-tech person - investors/traders are well known to buy high / sell low and I think that holds true for businesses.
I suspect VR needs more AI in it for story telling and experience as suspect most of the VR work is more akin to 90's expert systems. Open worlds needs standards for open explorations and standards may be the key for all the current LLMs and next generation models to show up in VR.
Assuming FB has been successful in leveraging the inhouse pytorch expertise over these years and hopefully has not lost it's people in their zealous cost cutting when forced to de-prioritize VR. If that is the case, then we have seen that many times over and over - deep pockets and patience wins most of the trades
Facebook is far from done or broke. Especially now where we have the hype and progress around chatgpt. They are in an excellent position regarding that tech.
None of them were technical. To the extent they contributed, it was either irrelevant to execution or simply a vaporware idea they had no ability to make happen (the twins).
Sure, if you're talking about a pre-seed stage startup with a single product 20 years ago. Meta/Facebook isn't that anymore, and hasn't been that for a very long time. Say what you want about Zuck, but the fact he more or less successfully has been running one the worlds largest tech companies of the century is pretty impressive.
What other products do they have other than those they acquired? 98% of their revenue is from advertising on Facebook and Instagram (according to their financial reports).
Perhaps it's done great on a YTD basis or since the panic low last Fall, but overall Meta has been a laggard for many years now. A mere 36% return over the last 5 years compared to 66% for SPY and 96% for QQQ. Furthermore, it's still nearly -40% off its peak in September 2021.
