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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Sigh, you've overlooked the fact that he built a hugely profitable business so now he can now throw money into "building the future". AI, VR, etc.

Google was probably the 20th search engine. They make most of their money selling ads.

Microsoft just rebuilt CP/M and bought many of their big apps.

It's what you do after you build a great business that matters.

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Making gobs of money and making the future are orthogonal though.

Exxon makes tons of money but is likely irrelevant to the future.

"It's what you do after you build a great business that matters"

Why's that? Why not just skip the business step entirely? There is some kind of fallacy in your argument.

How are you going to pay for all those moonshot projects that cost billions and might not make money for a decade, if ever. Google still hasn't made any money on the self-driving car. Oculus Rift?

I don't think Oculus Rift is going anywhere. They bungled that project pretty well. My question was more about your assumption about getting some kind of cash cow and then milking it to provide for "moonshots". It is one model that works but it's not the only one. Well, actually, it's debatable whether it works or not.

What you think about Oculus is irrelevant. FB has the money to see it through, along with dozens of other similar projects. Feel free to explain the other models.

State sponsored fundamental research for one. Pretty much all of the actual computing innovation was a direct result of fundamental research that was sponsored by the state either directly or indirectly. Heck, modern compilers have a direct line back to Grace Hopper working at the naval research lab.

Commercializing stuff is great and all but there is no point in pretending it is the same or equal to the kind of innovative work that consistently happens at research universities and arguably a lot of the future is invented there even if it is not commercialized.

Also what are these dozens of other projects Facebook is currently innovating on? I do see a lot of duplicated effort across google, facebook, apple, and microsoft when it comes to AI research though. This is why I don't quite get how people can argue for commercial innovation and market efficiency all in the same sentence or paragraph when there is obvious and clear evidence to the contrary.

I guess you don't understand the value behind the trillions of dollars of R&D spent over the past 50 years by tech companies like Xerox, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Google, etc

Not really. I do see a staggering amount of waste though. Duplicated effort across the board, re-invention of the same basic building blocks re-packaged and re-branded, billions spent on patent suits, billions spent on lobbying, etc. Competition in basic innovation does not make sense. In fact I'm not even sure how much of those "trillions" contributed to actual innovation. I suspect a proper analysis would reveal an extremely poor efficiency ratio and only a few keystones that could trace their history directly back to a university research projects and other state sponsored projects.

LOL, you see "a staggering amount of waste" in commercial entities and thing the way to find efficiency is to look to the government? Like government-sponsored research is going to be more efficient? That's a good one.

Basic research is exactly the kind of thing that markets are bad at doing, so it really wouldn't be surprising. Which country do you see as a model of the success of privately funded research? As far as I can see, all countries that are making significant contributions to science are spending lots of government money on it.

Providing cheap energy to whole economies probably plays a (major) role in building the future.

I don't have anything against building what people want or re-packaging what existed already in better ways. My issue was with the title. I don't doubt for a second that Zuckerberg is a great business mind but building the future requires a bit more than business acumen.

I think with business acumen you can hire all the "more" you need.

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