Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the two are equivalent however.

Agree with you here -- Facebook had a well-formed mobile strategy, the only question was whether it would work. Once it started to work, the stock took off like a rocket.

Snap is a much bigger question mark. So far their plan looks to be "Do what Facebook did, only for AR/VR". Except Facebook and Snap will be splitting the market; where Facebook had no competition and absolute dominance before they IPOed. Facebook is obviously playing to win on Snap's home turf. Even if Snap is successful, Facebook will make it very expensive for them.

I haven't been following SnapChat too closely, I know they made some glasses not too long ago. It is surprising to me that they are trading on the ID that they will be more successful in AR/VR. I can't imagine have invested nearly as much into AR/VR as Facebook/Oculus. Amount invested doesn't mean success for sure but I expect Facebook to be at the forefront of AR/VR at least in the near future.

AR is unfortunately such a broad label, covering an enormous variety of implementations from dedicated headsets to phone cameras.

I'd argue Snapchat delivered one of the first mainstream AR 'hits' - many of my friends can't get enough of their AR photo filters. To be fair, many of them are extremely impressive tech demos, fluidly augmenting the user's face in real time video. Whether that's a meaningful strategic advantage is another question!

Right; AR is significantly less useful without a massive data platform backing it up. But the real problem is that Snap doesn't really have too many paths for growth that don't run into Facebook's existing network effects.

Facebook is already a top aggregator -- and already has a lot of preference data from billions of users. Those are enormous network effects, and even if Snap is hugely innovative, Facebook will always be able to replicate Snap's products much faster and better than Snap will be able to replicate Facebook's network effects.

My understanding is that the glasses were little more than a gimicky way to get more use of their platform. Felt kinda CueCat-ish to me.

Facebook's IPO was botched which caused a pretty big slide the day of the offering. The next two weeks it continued to go further below IPO price to -50%. Quarter after quarter analysts questioned if they could maintain growth and profits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com