Cute. Whenever someone wants to defend their dear little niche/dead end product they always make that reference on HN. Similarly on slashdot with the ipod comment. Yet there is a subtlety that every person who makes this broken analogy are missing (apart from the fact, that, well, if someone made a book that kept a record of all instances this analogy was made on HN, it would be hard to miss the fact that.. no, X pet product defended Y times on hn didn't become the next dropbox)
The criticisms against dropbox and the first ipod were nerds who thought there was already, -within the same product category- good enough things, underestimating the importance of things like UI, accessibility, portability (in the case of the ipod when people compared it to the gigantic creative jukeboxes and mp3 CD-R players).
They were criticism targeted at a single product, not an entire category, because no one sane would think there's no use for tools that remotely sync documents, or gives you the ability to listen to your entire music collection on the go. Dropbox and the ipod were great, refined products, but products that stood on the shoulders of giants and markets that were already plentiful by the time they came out. Keeping backups of documents is a need a great amount of people have. People were already listening to portable music when the ipod came out. They were product that did important things better than anyone else on the market, but products that entered markets that were already quite mature. Meanwhile VR as a whole is still a niche.
VR enthusiasts are more like the nerds of old who made fun of dropbox. They have very little understanding of the wants of the general public. Shut yourself in a closed uncanny valley virtual world wearing an uncomfortable headset for hours? This is more like the people who thought rolling your own was better than dropbox.
Zuckerberg is not the next Steve Jobs. If anything, he's the carbon copy of the typical slashdot reader. His mindset is thoroughly alien to the human mind.
https://qz.com/1331956/mark-zuckerberg-keeps-forgetting-abou...
>In the Recode interview, Zuckerberg falls back on the term “use case” to describe people using Facebook Live to stream their own suicides in real time. He repeats this characterization, going on to call suicide-streaming a “use” of Facebook Live: “There were a small number of uses of this, but people were using it to…show themselves self-harm or there were even a few cases of suicide.”
This is the sort of people who think the future of humanity is to enclose yourself harder in your little virtual bubble. The everyday man finds this sort repellent.