This bodes very poorly for Facebook. The money may still come in but forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference between a trendy company like Facebook and a corporate monolith like Oracle.
Google, whatever its problems, gives some indication of keeping up with the times. Aside from undisputed leadership in AI, there are the little things: they recently overhauled their chat tooling (again) and (finally) added Slack-style emoji reactions. If they still had some of their mid-2000s mojo, it would be neat to see them try again with a social network product.
And Google has led in AI for the past decade so I'm not sure how you got the impression that FB is doing and Google is just sitting on cash. Looks exactly opposite to me.
Groups compete well with reddit.
As they build a 'metaverse' groups, marketplace, and walls can form the foundation
you wall is your own personal space. Your groups and the marketplace become places that you go to.
Kinda reminds me when as a kid I was excited about windows 3d UI since it sounded cool, but quickly realized it's way less convenient.
Have you used a few VR devices over the last decade, including the last Quest?
Maybe when they scale it down to the size and heft of swimming goggles.
I despised Facebook before everyone else but seriously:
Google is extremely well known for killing useful stuff that people love, not for moving them forward incrementally.
I can't remember Facebook killing off anything since parsley or whatever it was called.
Google has also been going backwards since I don't know, 2009 or something? (Back in the day it used to be that search results somewhat reliably contained the the you searched for. Today Google is in my opinion a copy of the competitors they outcompeted: customer hostile ads, poor results.)
Facebook is the ugly thing it has been since I don't know when.
- search (although this one barely qualifies in my opinion)
- GMail/GSuite (once provided ever increasing storage, also killed free GSuite etc etc but I'll count it, it exists and has even expanded a bit)
- YouTube
- Ads
- Android
- Chrome
Quite a portfolio actually. Says something about how much I dislike them when I had to think long and hard to admit it.
I'm not sure the metaverse play really is anything other than continuing the same thinking that led to Facebook login required for Oculus. The idea is probably to roll out VR no differently than rolling out emoji reactions. It's what you do when you get big. 1B users * 10% using new feature = BIG NEW USER BASE and you get to report growth for years as 10% turns into 20%.
Besides being a complete disaster, UI-wise, it freezes up and ceases working constantly in the web UI. The remaining people I know who stay on Google's chat... I simply cannot talk to anymore. I send them email or use an alternative chat service they're on.
You might consider a different example of how you feel Google is keeping up with the times.
Nah, it's okay that I feel differently about a feature than you and say so publicly.
Are engineers really the ones driving at the company? I think that has not been true in "the industry" for a decade now. Marketing, upper-management are the ones steering the ships now — engineers just row.
Not sure if it’s still the case but until fairly recently you could still see writely in the different domains Docs cycles through when logging in.
Oracle is still one of the most profitable companies on earth. I highly doubt they care about being trendy.
If I had to trade places with one of those two, I’d pick Ellison. I didn’t even bother to look up their (theoretical) net worths, because at that scale it no longer makes a difference; what does make a difference to me is Ellison’s face isn’t regularly in the news attached both to stories about how they engage in censorship by removing people who break the site rules, and to other stories about how they take sides by failing to remove politicians who violate the site rules.