Facebook’s big vulnerability

I remember when I tried the first iPhone in 2007. Sure, it wasn't super fast, the screen was small and pixelated by today's standards, but I remember going "Holy shit, this is amazing." It was easy to see its utility on the first use of it.

Contrast that with a VR headset. I think "This is a cool game to play for 20 mins or so", but I have absolutely no desire at all to spend any portion of my time in "the metaverse". This is fundamentally solving a problem that people don't have, and it's a solution they don't want. I have yet to see anyone (who isn't somehow paid to shill it) be genuinely excited about the potential of "the metaverse".

We do a bad job of extrapolating where the future will be from current trends. The frequent breakthroughs in physics and industrial, precision manufacturing of heavy machinery around the mid 20th century eventually slowed down. The remaining problems got too hard to make major leaps and bounds improvements on at the same pace, and the desire/value to keep pushing on it slowly faded. It' still there, but a computing revolution happened instead.

There's no reason to think the future revolving around improvements in networked computing is going to go on forever, we just don't know what the next "thing" is going to be. I'd argue most of the benefits of having the internet readily available at all times in all places are basically already realized by smartphones and anything else is mostly just going to be a refinement or intensification of stuff we already know. It will not be transformational in the way smartphones were. It's on a similar arc where the leaps-and-bounds improvements are harder to come by and it's not clear what we'd do with them when they happen. Gone are the days when anyone would notice a performance improvement in their day-to-day computing tasks from having a cutting edge CPU or GPU. Advancements are increasingly only useful for more niche use cases that refine and improve what we already have rather than dramatically altering the way we work. Faster mobile data is cool, but it doesn't change the way you use your phone and neither will a more immersive computing interface markedly change how you do the tasks you use a networked computer to do.

I don't know what the next field that undergoes such revolutionary change will be. If I were a betting man I'd put my money on major breakthroughs in biomechanics and life sciences, but who can say for sure?

It's a bit like with climate change. We're not going to like what we need to do to stop it, but we must do it.

I'm not so sure, but perhaps... although there's some really big problems that need to get solved to get there, and some of them aren't technological problems.

1. The technology isn't there yet. To their credit, it might be getting close though. A not insignificant number of people still get sick from VR goggles. The resolutions just aren't at present sufficient. Available portable computing power might not be enough at present. IMO, the cartoonized VR environments we can currently produce on the fly aren't going to be of as much interest as more realistic environments and avatars. The spatial resolution of sensors and lack of tactile feedback aren't gonna cut it for even the most basic tasks.

2. People wearing VR goggles look dorky AF. In fact, they ARE dorky AF.

I don't think Facebook's upper management fully appreciates this issue. Social stigma is a hell of a thing to try and fight. It's not impossible to do, but it will be way more challenging than I believe they think it is.

3. No one wants to wear a blindfold in public. VR goggles are basically that and worse. AR might be able to address that, but for whatever reasons, having a screen in your hand doesn't trigger the same vulnerability response people would have to VR goggles. (It should, because it steal our attention like nothing else, but it doesn't.) People don't feel comfortable if they can't read the social cues of people around them and see danger approaching.

I think one of their strategies is the most promising: Turn AR/VR into a common workspace standard. Monitors are big, clunky, hard to move, inflexible, etc. If you could use VR to create a really clean functional workspace to replace the monitor, that might be a real winner and help drive up comfort and adoption issues.

This is still a really hard domain to solve though. In video calls, we still have a lot of people who call in on their phone. This technology is compatible with lots of devices. One person wearing a VR isn't going to be compatible with everyone else though. If I'm meeting you, in general and especially for anything with higher stakes, I don't want to talk to a fucking cartoon, I want to see your face.

People will rent digital objects and transfer real world wealth to the elite in order to do so.

And then, on top of that, would FB have been able to produce something good enough to convince buyers to use a FB phone despite privacy concerns?

Seems like a big lift and the same challenge they'll face with VR and a bad privacy reputation. They're not just climbing the hardware/software/UX hill, they're also climbing the public opinion, regulation hill.

Apple owns almost all the profit-share in the market and the rest is mostly coming from low-margin, commodity phones. Facebook doesn't need the data of price-conscious people willing to penny pinch to buy a cheap-o Facebook phone. They need to hoover up the data of iPhone users. That's where the valuable advertising bucks are.