Zuckerberg wants to be the hero of the metaverse because Facebook is boring
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
One thing the author is leaving out is that Oculus headsets ARE successful and the industry is iterating quite nicely. Quest 2 does NOT have a competitor with its feature set at its price point, I wish it did because Id buy it in a heartbeat; but it doesnt. You can argue that its not ubiquitous enough yet but it is growing, the headsets are getting more comfortable and coming out with more features. Since I got the quest new features have been continuously released through software updates, including a bump from 90hz to 120hz refresh rate, and native desktop PCVR wireless streaming that made tethering obsolete. I can play AAA titles like Flight Simulator 2020 and Half Life Alyx wirelessly, do some moderately intense cardio with boxing and fitness apps, and work comfortably for an hour or two with giant virtual desktop screens. It's certainly not a stagnant field, just not mainstream yet.
Let's compare to other electronics that are arguably "mainstream":
Nintendo Wii - 101 million
Nintendo DS - 154 million
Sony PS4 - 116 million
Apple iPhone 12 - 100 million
Apple AirPods - over 100 million in 2021
$600 million from 2 million customers (not including $ spent on games). How much money does FB make from 2 million FB users?
Answering your question is difficult because the kind of people who buy a Quest have more money to spend and therefore advertisers' click-through rate might be different.
Zuckerberg has previously said that he wants Facebook to "effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.” So while I definitely see where you're coming from, the intent here seems to be, in the longer term, to transition FB users from mobile/desktop use and into an AR/VR environment in one form or another. With that in mind, it's valid to acknowledge Oculus sales numbers relative to FB MAU numbers.
I have a Quest 1, but don't have a PC to have ever tested tethering... so I've only used it to play games on the device itself.
The real problem is class. Always has been.
Actually, that's more of a side benefit. The real reason they do it is because they enjoy racial stereotyping (cf. Avenue Q's "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"). White-bashing is a safe outlet for that urge. If it were still socially acceptable to stereotype Asians as soulless, interchangeable technicians, they'd do that too.
White-bashing is also the socially sanctioned way to signal that you're racially conscious. This qualifies you for elite white people jobs like the Harvard admissions committee, where it's important that everyone have the mindset needed to limit the representation of the racial groups considered undesirable.
(Note that Harvard does not consider white a racial or ethnic group; only non-whites are racial/ethnic. You can see this from their yearly report of admissions by race, where whites are not mentioned and the racial percentages mysteriously add up to only about 55%: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics)
Who knows, maybe at some point some big company comes around with a fresh look at it and manages to make this thing cool, but I doubt it will be Facebook/Meta.
I doubt it will eliminate the inherent problems, even if they make the headset very light. It is still something that you will want to take off your head after some time. Heck, even my headphones (that are very comfortable!) make me uneasy after on hour or so. Plus many people experience slight dizziness that is probably tolerable but not exactly a nice thing to have for entertaining.
What they can do is to make a series of continues improvements, not just to hardware but also software - Beat Saber is absolutely amazing, and they are some other nice games, but it still feels like far below expectations.
Is it the shape of the screen?
Facebook largely relies on 3rd parties to run their business. Without Apple and Google phone access, they are dead in the water.
If they made a fundamentally killer new physical device, they would own it end to end and remove a whole risk category from their business. That's why Mark is investing $10b a year in VR R&D.
Look at the Gameboy/DS/3DS/PSP/Vita. By far the most popular set of non-phone handheld devices in existence. Obliterated by phones.
Together all of Nintendo's and Sony's handhelds have probably sold over a billion, several orders of magnitude more than all VR devices combined and in 2 generations they were wiped out.
The only way Meta can win here is if there's some sort of neural link that completely surpasses phones. I don't bet on it.
Look at cable TV advertising.
Love the Cable TV advertising example - Meta killed that.
Nintendo Switch has sold 90 million units, right up there with other best selling gaming systems.
I don’t disagree with your main point, but your example wasn’t accurate.
Either way the Switch has sold far slower than both Nintendo's handhelds and consoles.
It's only hard to believe now because the tech is in about the PalmPilot phase.
* Google -- interior navigation
* Facebook -- face recognition, posts
* Apple -- style and cool factor
That said, the obnoxious complaining attitude of the article reeeally grates on my ears. Lots of companies are trying very hard -- on their own dime -- to make this happen, knowing that most of them will almost certainly fail, and this guy wants to whine about it? What an ass.
Technology clunks until it doesn't. That's just how progress works. The same article could have been written about any of the last big technologies before they were mature: personal computers, the internet, smart phones, social networks. Nobody knows if or when AR will click, and the only thing to do is keep trying.
Also, he could have done without making it a race thing.
But yeah, the article is pretty weak. People keep trying because AR/VR is going to be massive if the hardware is solved. Being the gateway to a person’s entire world (AR) or the next major media and productivity tools (VR) will make you one of the most powerful companies in the world.
If fb did meta as a separate company/project and not directly linked to zukerburg and maybe had fb as a partner company they would have made this whole thing feel less silly and less creepy.
Given that, then this seems to me that his passion for this is strong enough to overcome any reservations he or anyone around him might have. He's not dumb, and he surely knows what's what re current PR and image problems etc, so this looks (to me) like an expression of belief in what his vision is for the future.
Mark hasn't seen them.
They'd all be better served by turning it over to professionals, but they have to do it themselves.
The thing that puzzled me about the Meta presentation was that Zuckerburg could hire the best hair and makeup people in the world to at least help him look less creepy, but he doesn't. There's really no excuse for that. The look hurts his goals, but he sticks with it.
Hardware control seems to be the big money move, especially as advertising is looking less like a money firehose as governments start to catch on to how dangerous it is. A theory I’ve been entertaining is that he’s chosen to execute now in response to Apple & Google’s centralized control over hardware, which was directly and explicitly used to attack facebook’s sole means of funding itself.
If this metaverse bullshit catches on, zuck will have unaccountable control over his users eyeballs, software distribution and competition, and who knows maybe even the industry standard 30% tax. Here’s hoping the antitrust crowd is watching closely. I wonder if that’s why they’re investing mostly in the EU for their workforce vs the US (EU very much wants to be a tech rival to the US after all).
They're essentially circumventing market mechanisms (which would require a whole lot more people than just Zuckerberg to think that such a project was a good idea) and wasting a bunch of resources because they've been overcompensated for their other successful projects.
The market can't self regulate if only very few megacorps have an iron grip on it and can stamp out any threat immediately.
How is this determined? Are market mechanisms not working in stock trading either? Seems like they are delivering decent profit numbers for their investors, compared to other companies.
This is IMO completely the wrong benchmark. Are they delivering value to society? Yes some, but IMO not nearly in proportion to the amount of wealth they've accrued. Your free to make your own judgement about that, but if you agree then you also agree that market mechanisms are not working in this case.
How is this determined? I am trying to see if there is some actionable chain of reasoning here, or if people are just stating the top 5 companies in the public markets qualify? Is it a certain net profit margin? A combination of various factors?
The funny thing is Facebook (or Meta I guess) could fall of the face of the earth tomorrow and humanity would not really be impacted other than temporarily losing WhatsApp groups and having to migrate to a different chat program.
That's my personal judgement.
The actionable response would be progressive taxation on corporate profits which would stop companies getting quite so large, and force (or strongly encourage) companies that wanted to continue growing beyond a certain point to split (which would have the effect of spreading control/power over the economy around).
> The funny thing is Facebook (or Meta I guess) could fall of the face of the earth tomorrow and humanity would not really be impacted other than temporarily losing WhatsApp groups and having to migrate to a different chat program.
Isn't that exactly the problem though. So much of societies resources going towards something that isn't ultimately that important. The opportunity cost here is huge.
Should we have prevented Amazon from investing into AWS? The meta universe seems like the next social platform and it's related to the facebook mission of connecting people virtually.
It's not about preventing it outright. It's about constrain resources to bias towards the invested-in company actually being profitable to allow other companies to compete with them on a level playing field.
> If this was investor funded couldn't Mark fund this himself?
If Facebook didn't make as much money then Mark wouldn't have as much money to invest. Which IMO would be a good thing as it would mean that wealth would be more distributed which would likely lead to it being used more wisely due to the wisdom of the crowd. Mark could probably still launch such a project (and I have no problem with that), just not with "hiring 10,000 staff in Europe for an unproven project" level of resources (which I do have a problem with).
[1]https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190507005765/en/Man...
That's the point. Market mechanisms will only fund things that will obviously succeed in a short time. A market cannot innovate or be creative. A single person, with a proven track record of being ahead of the curve, can.
>and wasting a bunch of resources
The tremendous excess of resources we enjoy today comes from allowing a large number of people to explore ideas without first proving that does ideas were guaranteed successes. Not only can we easily afford to waste resources, we can't afford not to.
Yes, that is why I believe we should distribute resources so that as large as possible a number of people continue to have that opportunity, rather than concentrating so many resources in one man's project.
This is clearly a very different situation to for example the case of 2 companies with 5000 employees or 4 companies with 2500 employees, or even 2000 companies with 5 employees. Those cases would all allow for much more variation in approach, and this in turn would allow much greater scope for market feedback from consumers to affect the development of the products offered.
One man gets to decide the direction and has ultimate control.
I think this sort of research done by large corporations is a big reason for the US's success. Just look at Xerox's PARC[0] where so much was incubated that couldn't have been if Xerox just focused on short term profit seeking.
Glynn research institute.
For that matter celera, which arguably shows that the market will fund things that will obviously NOT work in a short period of time; anyone with half a brain could have told you that they were unlikely to be able to 'patent half the genome' but it's like greed and not understanding the narrative dominated.
I credit the vision even if it repulses me. It's natural to imagine immersive content or at least digital overlays. That's a big vision and long term. The thing is, as an escape-hatch, it is too long-term. I don't expect to see any of these kinds of technologies dominating social spaces or commercial spaces for years to come. They're wonky, niche, and incoherent. It's also too unrealistic to awe critics enough to divert the public's attention away from Facebook/Meta's missteps.
I'm sure the tech's viability and popularity will change with the state of the art and with generational shifts and preferences. For now, I'm eagerly awaiting for Facebook/Meta to answer for the cesspools they've allowed to fester and the intrusions on basic privacy.
What business is going to let Facebook be the intermediary of its private internal communications? It would be hard to imagine even if FB was a relatively trusted company, but at the moment FB ranks somewhere between used car dealers and payday loan companies on the public trust scale.
The good news about this announcement is it gives other -- more competent and trustworthy -- companies permission to begin to work on a real metaverse.
I'd say no. It doesn't include the spatial computing aspects. You can say it was a precursor to the metaverse, but by the earliest definitions (Snowcrash et al), the metaverse has to be a replacement for the reality around you which encompasses all your senses.
What facebook is doing is preparing for the inevitable... they are going to break his company for monopoly reasons, therefore he needs zuckerberg to be seen as the CEO of something else, kinda what google does with alphabet were the founders basically run alphabet and have someone else run google in case they need a someone to put the blame on why "google shows first the image of trump when searching for idiot".
$299 is cheaper than most phones or consoles. It's far from $1000 rig + VR equipment. Are phones and consoles only for rich kids too?
What you can get for $299 right now is a pretty incredible experience and unthinkable 3-4 years ago. It also seems likely that VR equipment will remain subsidised like consoles are, with the cost in games/apps/content.
I'm also constantly amused that nobody mentions that one thing that snow crash explicitly identified as the key for the technology to take off. High fidelity facial capture. The book made a big deal about this. I think it was an astute thing. I don't think VR chat meets the bar.
Apple has been pushing in this area silently for years now with their industry leading LiDAR miniaturization and AR kit being used by many devs to actually ship augmented experiences.
While , here we have the CEO of Facebook coming out with an “Imagine . . “ line on half baked hardware and badly rendered experiences in a live stream.
I’m going to love watching Apple take a sledgehammer to these pipe dreams
I've been very critical of Apple on here, but i take my hat off to their dedication in shipping technology that no other company comes close to be able to ship. Globally, at consistent quality.
Outside of the US, buying an Xbox sucks, buying any hardware from Google or Facebook is a gamble (I tried, portal and Chromecast from official stores for relatives) and Apple is the only company that seems to delight.
I hated the keynote from Facebook yesterday, i can't believe they had the arrogance to think anyone outside of their offices would give a fuck about their fantasies and that there was ZERO substance.
Zuckerberg presents sometimes as suddenly widly ambitious, whilst so far maintaining the wide eyed - nobody knows who I'm supposed to be. God of personals sharing? Master of your wall of little notes?
This may prequel taking a more active stance in what Facebook means, and how it (supposedly) relates.