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Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

No he realises he needs to control the distribution medium. Apple and Google can’t be allowed to dictate what Facebook does in their platforms.

MZ needs to create an attractive platform of his own. For a brief moment he had one, Facebook was a platform, they managed to even get a killer app: FarmVille.

Then the iPhone came around and ate their lunch. No one cared about developing for Facebook anymore, only iOS and Android.

He will bet the company on a VR device that rivals the smartphone category. He has to.

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> MZ needs to create an attractive platform of his own

He already has it.

A platform of people > a platform of apps

Despite what people think about this guy being evil, robotic etc. He never used his 2.5B people platform to attack Apple, Google or any of the other tech companies. Nor to glorify himself or FB

Manufacturing hatred against competitors or super positive narrative for self can be done trivially and with little or no investment from Meta, given that they own FB, WA, IG.

The moment Zuckerberg steps down and another person gets at the helm of FB is gonna be a very tumoltous moment for humanity. People worried about Trump, Putin, Musk, Gates, WHO, WEF.. having too much power have seen nothing yet compared to a bad actor at the helm of FB.

It needs to be broken up, because if a bad actor manages to gain control of it, then it would be like the 1930s all over again. Except there would not be any place to escape to this time around

"Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...

Why would you waste time farming likes from the little people when you can swing elections and use your power to elevate certain politicians?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Naturally Zuckerberg was shocked - shocked! - that this happened.

Meta would - at best - be more of the same: harvesting interests, attention, and orientation and leveraging them for mass behaviour modification.

He could have released a “facephone” instead. It’s equally challenging, competes against apple, could use open source Android as a base. Perhaps it was too obvious of a route?

This was already tried

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/heres-why-the-facebook-phon...

An Android skin phone is not trying. Risking billions of dollars and years into R&D like Apple and Google did would be trying.

Considering the general public doesn’t know what “Android skin phone” means and they still failed, R&D wouldn’t save them.

They’re too late to the race.

The general public does know what a phone with a better screen, better battery life, longer lasting build quality, longer lasting software updates, faster processing power and snappier responses, secure operating system (less malware), and better camera quality means though.

But all that requires expensive and risky R&D.

Considering Apple cut his losses with the flip of a switch, he's permanently lost control of the distribution medium.

^^^ this. AR/VR is do or die for FB.

How long before they buy Unity?

They already considered it in the past, in fact Mark penned an email explaining why and how it would be beneficial to their broader ambitions to own more of the stack as a hedge for the future of computing. You can read more about it here:

https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/facebook-mulled-multi-bill...

It will likely happen at some point, if not by Meta than it'll be another tech giant like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or even Apple.

Amazon has an engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_3D_Engine

Cynically, I think they made it open source so they could get some free development for it.

Also they open sourced the bits they didn’t want yo keep proprietary…? According to Wikipedia:

> In July 2021, Amazon and the Linux Foundation announced _that parts_ of the engine would be used to create a new open source game engine called Open 3D Engine

DMA gonna snuffle out that dream nicely

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