The market hates innovation - until its successful, then loves it. Meta making such a big bet on the future, win or lose, is inspiring.
What are you even talking about? Huge VC funding is predicated entirely on innovation before proving success. The market loves innovation... when it actually makes some kind of coherent sense.
> Meta making such a big bet on the future, win or lose, is inspiring
No it's not inspiring, it's idiotic. That's like saying "I bet my house and my kids' college money on a new crypto coin, but win or lose, it's inspiring!" It's not inspiring, it's just irresponsible.
We already have VR. Incrementally, maybe there will be some sort of popular VR chat down the road, but it's just too expensive at this point for mass adoption. The distance between getting a Twitter account and hopping on the Metaverse is over $500.
The problem in every hype cycle of VR is never price. It's strapping a chunk of plastic to your head and blocking out the real world.
I see something like Google Project Starline as being a better bet for "mass adoption" in the application space that meta is aiming for.
I'd love to see a "Minority Report"-like interface in the form of Starline + Kinect. Oh, and with electronic ink to save my eyes. Thank you, future.
The idea of putting on a headset and "experiencing" a "chat" is a downright Lovecraftian dystopia that I want no part of - and I work in tech. Maybe it's the proximity to hardware that makes me so hostile to the idea, but I cannot for the life of me imagine doing that voluntarily. And thus I have to imagine that it wouldn't be voluntary if it becomes mainstream. "Everyone needs a facebook" becomes "everyone needs an Oculus" and so on. That it's $500 is a minor aspect of this.
> The idea of putting on a headset and "experiencing" a "chat" is a downright Lovecraftian dystopia
For the record, I fully believe that to be accurate for headsets. But how about fully immersive, 270°-by-270° viewport VR helmets? I've just come back from a beach holiday, and the thing that struck me was how many children were using snorkeling helmets. Not snorkels and goggles, but full-on helmets with a builtin snorkel jutting out on top. If kids can find such devices comfortable for making their swimming and light diving experience easier, then from a form factor point of view, a VR device going the same route might not be an entirely impossible thing.
The tech sure isn't there yet. And from a latency point of view, may never[0] become a reality. But a device around one's head appears not to be unthinkable.
0: I don't know how many milliseconds of visual latency a human brain can tolerate before breaking the immersion and/or giving the user a headache, but I suspect it's in single digits. Getting to those kinds of refresh rates, the display bandwidth demands would be insane. Possibly beyond what's physically possible.
Google has its playstore to sell freely its services.
Facebook needs a way out. TikTok needs a way out.
The only policy that was detrimental to Facebook was to have the shocking audacity to, gasp, ask for a user's permission before tracking them on every other app and website. And, shockingly, nearly everybody said "No, I don't want to be tracked everywhere."
Facebook's business model deserves to die if that's the policy that kills it.
Now if Apple actually becomes a virtual monopoly or it's the opposite and they have to cut their margins it's a quite different picture.
Also a move like this would be almost certain to invite government intervention.
I guess the parent commenter used the wrong word to describe the people who tell meta not to innovate.
Crossing the chasm is a real thing for startups, and in that sence the mainstream indeed doesn't like the early part of innovation.
So when you say "mainstream" instead of "market", than it does makes sense.
Parent commenter was clearly referring to the investment market, since the entire subject is a fall in stock price. Crossing the chasm has nothing to do with the investment market.
> activist letter telling Meta to give up on the Metaverse
I assumed it were some users who came up with that letter, but a quick google search indeed revealed it was investors. That wasn't clear to me and you are indeed correct.
Perhaps you're confusing the market with the "public market", publicly held companies? But the private market is very much part of the market. Nobody's leaving money on the table, that doesn't even make any sense.
$100bn. One. Hundred. Billion.
Do you really think this is an efficient allocation of resources? Here's a thought: Zuckerberg is worth $30 to 40bn [1]. Let's take $10bn of that and let Zuckerberg personally invest that in start-ups. Which team do you think will innovate more? Facebook burning ten times that? Or $10bn fronting founders?
Yikes.
Mark's metaverse is very specifically a shared virtual physical environment. Yes you're going to pay to enter spaces and have experiences and buy clothing... but Horizon Worlds isn't an app on the platform. It is the platform, it is the metaverse, everything is happening within it in Mark's vision here.
Metaverse == Horizon Worlds
The Quest operating system, and the Meta app store, are obviously not the metaverse... the metaverse is a universe of shared 3D spaces. That's Horizon Worlds. The spaces are the "worlds".
As to the bet on a metaverse, this idea comes from the 80s, and Meta has executed remarkably poorly on it - who can forget the legless avatars. Not even their own employees want to use it:
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/inside-a-meta-virtual-realit...
To put that in perspective, I’ve seen an estimated cost of setting up a small colony on Mars to be that much.
Even to get a conservative 10% ROI (super low for the level of risk they are taking), they’d need to net $3 billion a year. I can’t think of any scenario where that is possible any time soon.
The market hates not being sold on a story. And honestly Zuckerberg completely failed to sell the public on the metaverse.
We've had VR worlds for a decade plus. Noone used them. Horizon Worlds is the same thing, but monetized. And extremely expensive to build for some odd reason and with basically no users.
The current plunge we're seeing is a vote of no confidence from the market.
Debatable. ARK's Tesla forecasts lean heavily on robotaxi revenue and value creation. The valuation to private investors in SpaceX depends very heavily on Starlink becoming a global telecom giant because rockets by themselves would never be so valued.
Without that belief in a future, those companies would be worth far far less. What happened to Meta is that the potential of the metaverse turned out to be way too similar to a second Second Life. As long as Starlink isn't perceived as a second Iridium, it will have access to cheap capital.
The stock price doesn’t affect meta, unless they want to raise money