They might want to become a cloud infrastructure provider for some side money and buy themselves some time to figure out this Metaverse fantasy :)
Hey, AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.
If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Valve or build a gaming platform. I don't know how they can be successful in whatever the fuck the Metaverse is without a gaming/media platform.
He would step in a long queue, and would get the same answer everyone in front of him: Gaben wouldn't let it slip out even from his cold dead hands.
Maybe that's an idea
All of these growth idea sounds incredibly boring. More likely? Maybe, but incredibly boring. Meanwhile meta is at least sounds pretty interesting.
There need to be some fun for him to just not permanently retire on his Hawaiian Island.
But does it? It sounds hopeful for someone that has no interest in the real world and only wants to create an imaginary world for themself. For those that actually like to step away from the keyboard and experience other aspects of the world around them, this is just another yawn.
Anyway Facebook's cash position is $60b, they can't afford it
Ever heard about non-all cash deals?
Besides, that $60-some B is after nearly $20B in buybacks from Q4 so they could've without it. But as they did, some two months of saved up FCF and they can again.
I like these Zuck spitball ideas tho.
Is the idea really that the metaverse is their big next market? I like VR but who the heck believes FB will lead it?
Sony could if they were game enough to compete with the Oculus Quest and build something that would work either standalone or wirelessly with a PS5 to handle more intensive games. Same goes for MS ofc.
I think the big fuckup by FB/Meta here is not having the foresight to acquire Unity no matter the cost. They should have made a massive stock deal for it even if it caused their own stock price to take a massive hit in the short term.
The long term benefit of owning the most pervasive toolchain + the most dominant VR platform would have essentially ensured their market position for the foreseeable future. The only other engine that is half-decent for VR is Epic's UnrealEngine and there is a huge step up in complexity, pipeline etc from Unity to get there.
If you’re paying retail for GCP, you are getting fleeced.
If they wanted to go down that route they needed to start around 2015.
No, it really did not.
The reality is even if Meta has the best data center infrastructure in the world their infrastructure is focused solely on solving their problems and operates under the constraint that it is not consumable by any arbitrary company. aws was built more or less in isolation to amazon's original infrastructure and gcp was built as a layer on top of google's internal infrastructure. there is use in what exists internally but only to (re)build the product you'd sell.
The lead time for them to get even basic primitives out the door would be significant, not even considering the depth of features that more sophisticated cloud customers want.
>>"The tougher part is perhaps not technical, but human. Facebook will have to build out an enterprise sales and support team that is culturally and operationally very different from running an ad-supported social network. Google, also a primarily ad-supported company, suffered from this “identity crisis” and is still trying to catch up to AWS and Azure, despite offering what many believe is a superior technical product."
He also points out they also have a trust deficient due to all the privacy and misinformation scandals.
[1]https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud...
AWS Data centers are fairly small, ~180,000 sq ft or so generally, us-east-2 is about 900,000 sq ft. us-east-1 perhaps 8 million sq ft.
Google likely has more network capacity, but FB is catching up.
That's 26 million sq ft vs Facebook's 40.5 million.
Does FB see spikes like that, or is it more consistent? I don't see FB having "spare" capacity to lease. Then again, I'm not a data center manager type, and just sit here in my comfy armchair playing QB.
I think an opportunity can be found in approaching search. They already have so much data about what people are interested in, and they can start by perfecting Facebook Marketplace to a simple user-friendly successor to Craig's List.
Yeah, I've heard of trying ovh [cloud]. That's the only non-American company's cloud I've heard about trying. Oracle and one another, maybe IBM?, are the only non-big three clouds I've ever looked at. Mostly because of their better free tiers and/or healthy free credits.
Amazon also had built their DCs for Amazon, and Google for Google, so that's not a valid argument. But it does take a lot of work to turn that into a marketable product (and transform your company culture to support it), and I don't think it makes sense for Meta to go down that route.