Hacker News Reader

>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it.

Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting. As far as Zoom support, again, why would anyone trust Facebook infrastructure with private meetings?

Aside from the trust issue, why buy hardware from FB just to have meetings?

> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure

Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.

Whatsapp had already carved out its market (because of SMS being charged for in its initial markets) before Facebook acquired it. https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...

Granted that they've at least tripled MAU since, but that's the power of network effects. There's a heavy dose of "in spite of" rather than "because of". On the other hand if Meta tried to, say, merge Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, I think they'd lose half their users overnight.

Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.

> Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.

Zoom's continued survival still surprises me. There was a point in time during its meteoric rise, early in the pandemic, when stories broke about it being spyware for China and a security threat, and its use was subsequently banned in many places. Then some months later people were back to using it, as if nothing ever happened.

Zoom had appaling security when it started being used by the masses. But it did the right thing, acquired Keybase which were doing really great work in the field of security and UX, and they subsequently fixed the problems Zoom had (stories about spyware for China are bullshit, as usual, they just had just *really* basic issues like anyone was allowed to crash into a meeting by just knowing its ID, which used to be easy to guess). Today, I consider Zoom a solid, safe choice for private meetings until something new comes to light that proves otherwise.

I think you're forgetting the core controversy, which was that their marketing materials proudly claimed they used end-to-end encryption, which was just completely false at the time.

Zoom has by far the best feature set out of any videoconferencing system - Zoom Rooms work almost seamlessly, and the core product is pretty user friendly and incredibly reliable from my experience - something I've never been able to say about Hangouts, Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting or Webex.

It also has appalling UX. They seem to place buttons completely at random. Pop ups all over the place. It makes Teams look good.

I donr use zoom much but it has a very intuitive UI - everything is easy to discover.

Meanwhile in TEAMS people dont know how to do things.

Recently I had a meeting that was supposed to be recorded, firsf nobody could record it; now the supplier side does not know how to share it as a downloadable file.

The Microsoft cloud experience is pure trash from productivity point of view.

My favorite thing about Zoom (and I suspect a large portion of its staying power) is that it somehow manages to just work on every device, even if your device is slow or your internet connection is garbage. Heck, I’ll be on a Zoom call on my phone driving in a rural area with two bars and I’ll somehow still get grainy video.

In comparison, I use teams for my two person startup and we can only get that absolute trash fire working reliably about 75% of the time.

So? OP claimed nobody was willing to do private communication on facebook/meta infrastructure. More than 2 Billion people on the planet do just that on WhatsApp, which is Meta. It doesn't matter that WhatsApp started as its own thing, it is owned by Meta and people use it all the time for very private things.

Facebook messenger is another example, hundreds of million of people use it all the time.

>So? OP claimed nobody was willing to do private communication

You are arguing against an obviously silly false premise. I said "large numbers of people" were unwilling to use FB for private communication.

There's also the ios to Android usecase.

Whatsapp was hugely popular before Meta bought it.

In fact, it lost quite a bit of users when Facebook bought it, as many tried to move their networks to Signal, Threema etc

So what was said is exactly right: nobody trusts Meta, rightly so

By the way, case in point, look what happened about Facebooks promise to keep Whatsapp data separate and private

More people use WhatsApp today than when it was purchased. “Quite a bit” is not how I’d describe it.

> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure

Seriously, this is a really dense comment from previous poster. Sure people don't like the idea of a dedicated hardware appliance with camera and microphones from Meta but the idea that folks are so paranoid that they won't use any of Meta's private communications systems or infra is beyond out of touch with reality.

I had a couple models of Portal. Really useful products but they literally didn't iterate on adding features fast enough and they locked it out from the existing Android ecosystem. Too complacent IHMO. On top of that the built-in browser was a purposely limited version of chromium that seemed like whatever the custom user-agent was would just cause problems with all sorts of web-apps especially Google's (couldn't even sign into YouTube etc, got "unsupported browser" errors all the time).

The Portal TV is still the only good Consumer Home TV based VC system I've ever used (so good that its the only Portal device Cisco wouldn't ship WebEx on probably because it would be too competitive against their own hardware I suspect is the reason).

We should congratulate Meta on actually not destroying an app by buying it.

> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting.

A large number of people in your circle / on HN / etc perhaps, but I think the vast majority of the general population have no such concern.

Yes and no.

If you talk about privacy they don’t care but they absolutely do when it comes to “I was talking to my friend about X and suddenly I’m seeing ads for it everywhere - my phone must be listening to me”. Their phone may not actually be listening to them but as soon as they see what it means, people hate how their data is used. They just never made the connection before.

Doesn't matter. This device was clearly targeting corporate market where clueless individuals don't make purchase decisions on things like that.

Facebook is not very popular among IT people in corporate world.

It wasn't targeting the corporate market at first. It was conceived and designed as a consumer-oriented device.

Didn't know that. In that case how was this device supposed to compete with smartphones or tablets that we already have?

Totally different usecase. My elderly parents LOVE theirs - it's simple to make calls, the camera quality is great, the automatic pan and zoom was top notch (especially for following toddlers around the room, which was crucial to them to see their grandchildren during lockdown).

The story mode was much loved as well - my mother (an ex kindergarten teacher) would read the stories to my niece and nephew and they loved the AR effects and filters it applied to her, in tandem with the story.

It’s clearly not intended to compete with a smartphone. It’s 50 times the size and mains powered. It’s intended to be an always-on device with a wide camera and large screen that makes it easy for a few people to talk on video. Like video conferencing.

My family uses them so my parents can see my kids and they are great. We plop down on the floor in front of it and everyone has a chat, sees the kids, etc. propping up phones and straining to hear/see things is much inferior.

The elevator pitch I heard, was that it would be ideal for connecting grandparents who would struggle with existing videoconferencing software. So it would be a supplemental device -- not a replacement -- with ease of use for non-technical people being a main driver of adoption. It would be a wonderful gift to help keep in touch, though pricey.

This was conceived prior to the implosion of the Facebook brand during the Cambridge Analytical revelations. It's hard to say for sure how successful Portal would have been in another universe where that didn't happen.

No one had heard of Zoom in January 2020.

If it worked the way people wanted and was available in April 2020 people would have used it.

And yet the corporate world is increasingly on Facebook's Workspace.

I think it's very helpful of those corporations to clearly signal that they are a bad place to work.

There is an even larger group of people who happily used Facebook’s products to stay in touch before, during, and after the pandemic.

For much of the world, Whatsapp video calls were the standard way to keep in touch.

I highly doubt it. What percentage of those people spend money on FB?

>There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook

I wouldn't be surprised if Meta was the number one way people have private conversations on planet earth.

Chatting about grannies birthday? Sure.

Talking about company ip? Not a chance in hell.

When making a purchasing decision for company comms tools, guess which of those two have to be considered.

There's probably more people using WhatsApp securely in authoritarian hellholes and nightmarish war zones around the world than many of the alternatives you are thinking of combine.

Personally I wouldn't use any chat service for super sensitive conversations about company comms and IP that didn't have strong encryption as well as limitations on how messages can be backed up as well as disappearing messages. I think Signal is the only system that is semi-popular that does this where by default backups don't leave the device unencrypted.

As a recent insider, this is one of those things where the outside perception doesn't match the inside at all.

Privacy is taken more seriously at Facebook than any other place I've ever worked. It's drilled into you from day one that we have systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do.

You can make mistakes that bring the entire site down and cost the company millions and they won't fire you. If you try to bypass privacy controls on an ex-girlfriend's post, you're gone.

Yes, they hoover up a ton of personal data. But they guard it like the crown jewels. If you do want your data deleted, they'll delete it. I've worked on the systems responsible for this where we had to reason through what to do with things like offline backups.

I appreciate you making the point, but it sounds like the perception is correct, but the definitions don't match. Individual-human-level privacy controls are important, and it's good that they're in place, but equally important is the systemic use of all that hoovered data.

Sure, but I expect most people's primary threat model isn't that a rogue Facebook employee will access their data and use it to stalk them. It's that Facebook will sell their data to advertisers who will use it to better manipulate them, or to insurance companies who will raise their rates.

That’s another common misperception, that Facebook sells data. They don’t. They sell targeted advertising that uses that data. The advertiser API specifies descriptors for who should see the ads. There’s no facility for accessing private data.

Selling the data itself would be giving away a huge component of what differentiates their product from other advertising platforms. It would be like Coca Cola selling the recipe for Coca Cola.

That's true, but most users aren't going to understand or care about that distinction. And for the concern of targeted ads creepily following them everywhere, it doesn't matter.

And Facebook doesn’t sell user data either.

I know there are lots of people here knowingly redefining the meaning of sell in this regard, but doing so is really harmful to the privacy cause since most companies do actually sell user data so we need that distinction.

> systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do

Unless you are selling it to the highest bidder on behalf of the company, and that gets you an immediate promotion.

This comment could not be more wrong. The Portal failed because for exactly the reason the parent pointed out: it can't run the video conferencing apps people need it too.

If it's just Android then yeah, intercept the camera API to let the portal stuff work with any app and you've got yourself a killer product getting put on every grandparents TV.

It's difficult to describe how amazing Portal is. It was a game changer for those that used it

I get the feeling that the Quest Pro is a similar game changing experience, but the strategy tax from being forced into Facebook services is absolutely suffocating.

I am legit excited about the idea of having VR eye contact, and would gladly pilot headsets for my team. But nobody wants to be on Facebook's platform. It's embarrassing to even talk about it. And I'm frustrated that something that should be a fun, cool, liberating, wide open new platform is so stifled and locked down.

Locked down? The Quest allows both sideloading and third party app stores, and the browser has good WebXR support.

It’s far less locked down than an iPhone.

> The Quest allows both sideloading and third party app stores

When did that happen? Last I checked, sideloading was a potentially bannable offense (as in effectively bricking your device and losing you your Facebook account).

You could just use the Android Debug Bridge to load apps onto the Quest from a desktop.

For a more managed option, there’s SideQuest:

https://sidequestvr.com/

Also Meta itself offers AppLab which is a less strictly curated app store.

Meta desperately wants you to write apps for the Quest platform. Nobody is getting banned. (You don’t need a FB account anymore either.)

One didn't need FB account at the start either. Nothing says they won't bring it back despite backlash.

Even if they have now changed their opinion on what can be done a large amount of damage is done. No-one will actively monitor that have their changed their terms. I was also under the impression that it's FB account and do the tiniest mistake and you lose it all. Thankfully it's just FB account so unlike with Google no real damage will be done.

Even if the things are better now I kinda have moved on, like many others.

If you sideload pirated copies of commercial games that are on the Quest store, that's forbidden. But sideloading 3rd-party apps is fine.

The "grey area" is modding games(notably Beat Saber), since it involves replacing the APK with an altered one without the consent of the developer. And if the developer sells DLC, that cuts into their profit and maybe they'll threaten to sue Facebook for damages since they created the development tools and authorized development accounts that allow people to do it.

> Portal ended up failing so hard as a consumer product that it got transferred over to the Workplace division

The immediate response I heard from everyone who heard about it (not in my tech circle) was an immediate NOPE. Followed by “I’m not letting Facebook put a camera in my house.”

I don’t think the failure can be blamed on the lack of zoom support.

In contrast to all other comments, Portal was/is one of the best done video conferencing product made before pendamic, and fully support your speculation.

I wanted to buy it for personal work meetings usage, corporate usage to setup in conferencing room, etc, but..

[1] zoom wasn't supported.

[2] not available worldwide to buy.

[3] regularly out of stock when it even came.

One of the things that bothered me there was working with contractors. I felt like having two tiers really undermined a lot of the culture.

Ye you get an apartheid atmosphere when the amount of contractors go so high that they can't be experts anymore.

Oh so now there is a Xmas lunch, but a third of the group is not invited. Or "No ice cream" for you.

It is funny how it was the small things that pissed me off. Who in their right mind even has a Xmas lunch without everyone ...

It was always one manager layer disconnected from the actual contractors that pulled off the BS meany things. The direct management knew that had to give ice cream to contractors too.

The portal devices wouldn't have succeeded even if it came with lunch voucher for a 1:1 with the Zuck himself. The devices failed as a consumer product due to years of Facebook disregarding users privacy and their focus on growth at all costs. Zuck has become nothing more than a meme ceo and the only reason he hasn't been removed by the board is because of the king like structure that he has setup for himself.

> Feedback groups

What's that?

each team or project normally has a group where you can ask questions, provide feedback or ask for features.

Allowing sideloading of apps is a business decision, not a technical one.