Meta’s Reality Labs lost $13.7B on VR and AR last year | Hacker News Reader

Meta’s Reality Labs lost $13.7B on VR and AR last year

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28 pointselorant40 comments

R&D is an investment not a loss. It might be the case Meta is wasting money and isn't finding a viable path to a product, but that is yet to be determined.

do we see headlines describing how much Alphabet has "lost" on Waymo? or how much Toyota has "lost" on EV development?

why fall for that framing here?

One of the reasons Google changed its corporate structure to Alphabet was so that investors could see how much Google's moonshots were costing. So yes, we did see headlines about how much Google was losing and, as an investor, you should definitely care about the price tag of such endeavors.

Toyota bet big on hydrogen, not EVs. Now they are regretting it and shifting course, as of this past week.

EVs are a mistake. They are unsustainable. In the long run, all car companies will have to shift to hydrogen, no matter what.

Note that hydrogen cars are also EV's in a sense it is the electrical energy that is driving the motor and hydrogen is a consumable. Difference between Tesla and Mirai is the source of the electricity.

The difference is that a hydrogen car is much less resource demanding. It is the EV that is truly sustainable. We need to give them separate names like BEV and FCEV.

Investments can also be losses. So just because something was an investment doesn’t mean it can’t now also be a loss.

Money isn't lost its been spent on research, of course finding a 100 ways something doesn't work doesn't mean that much if you don't find the 1 way that does.

Meta are trying to force AR into the world, like trying to produce a baby in 3 months by having having 3 women. Maybe they are close, maybe they are producing a load of useful research for someone else to exploit in the future. Apple supposedly bringing out their thing 'this year', but there has been little exposed of it, maybe they are just egging on Facebook to waste there time/money .. time will tell.

Meta delivering an AR and VR experience is a non-starter for me. That environment is extremely immersive and extremely personal. I don't trust the Facebook people with putting things in to my brain, and I don't trust them with what I share through my VR experience.

You can't buy trust, and Facebook / Meta is lacking in that.

I want to see AR in the world, so I’m thrilled to see Meta making a big push in that direction. Hopefully, Apple does respond, and others too.

To me it’s as much an indictment of the field of software engineering that $13B couldn’t buy enough talent and creativity to make something even remotely interesting or compelling.

Seems like there must be a hell of a lot of very expensive “knowledge workers” cashing checks and contributing nothing to the field.

I think it's more an indictment of the idea that "bigger company == better company," the story typically told by Business People.

Managing large amounts of people is hard, and there are limits on how many can be effectively coordinated on a project. Therefore the larger the company, the taller and more complex the bureaucracy stack becomes, and as a company adds unbounded amounts of headcount, teams naturally reach their size limit and must fracture, adding another manager. Once the first management layer grows beyond a certain size, additional tier-2 managers must be added to coordinate the tier-1 managers.

Soon you wind up with a company like Meta, with thousands upon thousands of managers who are only managing other managers. Each of those people, being several steps up the management career ladder, are probably making well into six figure incomes. The on-the-ground employees doing the actual work probably account for a relatively small portion of that $13B.

It's an indictment not of the SE field, but of the current version of corporate structure: - managers valued (at least partially) by how many people they manage, so are incentivized to add unnecessary headcount - managers, PMs, and Tech Leads are rated favorably for driving a visible project forward by some measurable metric, but not necessarily for finishing projects or for necessary-but-unsexy work like bug fixing, reducing tech debt, or using political capital to stop wasteful projects before they start. This incentivizes the creation and abandonment of projects, or the churn of forever-projects that keep getting handed off to the next cohort to remake in whatever fashion they believe will the get themselves promoted, on and on forever.

I remember making mobile games/apps on early devices, I don't think any of those were particularly compelling either ...

This is like condemning carpenters for bad architecture. The software people have little role in deciding what efforts get funded at Facebook.

This came straight from the very top at Facebook.

You don’t think Facebook hired any software architects as part of that $13B?

You think Zuck needs to fully specify what he wants the company to build?

Or should a company be able to set out a goal - “make extremely compelling VR/AR experiences for consumers and businesses” and provide the funding and the mandate to hire the best and the brightest… and reasonably expect that $10+ billion later to have something remotely interesting to show for it?

Software architects, as the name implies, architect what engineering is asked to build. They don't decide what gets built.

They have managers for that:

"A product manager is a visionary who guides new product ideas from an initial concept to a full-blown product launch. Along the way, we collaborate with world-class engineers and designers..."

(Pulled from Meta's jobs page)

Or the hardware isn't there and you can't just software your way our of a hardware problem.

Nice having a little confirmation that money doesn’t solve product market fit, but bizarre that Facebook continues to hope that they’ll pound a market into existence by dumping billions into it.

I’m not fan of facebooks core product but I’d rather them dump this billions into something that employs people, moves the needle on vr and maybe gets some underlying tech in the future rather than just more stock buybacks or buying out and killing another company.

Stock buybacks is a form of returning money to investors which they then can decide themselves what are they going to do with. If they want to fund a VR company they can do it themselves.

The point I’m making is I believe Facebook investing in itself, is better than the alternatives like returning capital. Investors in Facebook also bought the stock, assuming they did any dd, that gives Zuck more voting rights with less shares. So until he is out or sells shares investors don’t have the same control they would under most other companies and thus really can’t decide for themselves. I believe the ceo has over 50% voting rights with under 13% owner ship. Facebook core product may not grow. Better for them to try to grow like Microsoft and have a lost decade than become the next xerox or yahoo.

By that logic Apple shouldn't have launched the Iphone, right? If investors wanted to fund a phone company they could have done it themselves?

Apple is currently returing all of it's net profits to shareholders via buybacks and dividends so it's an unfortunate example. Should they have spent the money to the apple car and other moonshots in your opinion?

Apple is totally dumping huge sums on its own VR project which doesn’t have a single customer while the Quest has millions of users. Same with the Apple Car project. Strange double standard to call out Meta for trying to break into a new product category but give Apple a pass.

But they're buying back stock too. 40B worth: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/01/facebook-parent-meta-announc...

It is too early. The technology is more of a hindrance than a third arm for the individual.

I don't understand why everyone is in a race to fulfil some weird dream that requires a lot of big technological leaps that aren't even on the horizon.

Ego of the founders wanting to be "on the ground floor" of the tech they read about in random sci-fi books as teens. Even though in most of those sci-fi books were schlock or allegorical about how technology alienates us.

I really don't think the hardware is the issue. We have great, cheap, and widely available headsets on the market, but nobody has thought of a killer app for VR yet. Facebook didn't and sorta just "winged it" to some degree of failure. According to Mark Gurman, Apple is stuck on the same question.

It very much sounds to me like VR just doesn't have any decent application. The dream of AR as truly assistive technology seems so far on the horizon that I struggle to incorporate it into serious MR/VR discussions. That's how bad the content drought is. Worse yet, every time this discussion comes up, people argue that VR will be adopted by decreasingly cost-sensitive fields. It used to be that VR was for gamers; that didn't work, so we pivoted to marketing it for engineers. That didn't work, so now... it's consumer hardware? It's for doctors? Soldiers? Who knows, just wait a few months and someone will fund a new excuse.

I think VR for games is fine, still clunky as a physical experience at the moment with relatively basic graphics. Improve those things and I'll be upgrading my Quest 1.

Half life Alyx is the best gaming experience I have had. It probably even ranks in the lower digits of all things I have ever experienced. Calling VR gaming useless is just completely wrong to me.

My stance is that the ‘killer app’ for AR is going to be a tidal wave of small, hyper focused, and boring utilities like “highlight ice on the sidewalk so grandma can still walk her dog in the winter”.

It's the next ecosystem and everybody wants to be able to get their 30% tax on all software and services that will be sold on it.

There’s 10’s of millions of VR gaming customers. That’s similar to the latest Xbox. Plenty of users get value out of these products today.

I still can't fathom why Zuck spent all that money developing the metaverse when he could have funded a dozen VR games that people would actually want to play.

The tech behind oculus is great but I don’t think it’s a consumer product at the moment.

There might be some better use cases especially with the sensing gloves that Zuck shared last year.

Imaging doctors training for surgeries wherever they are without requiring to be in a hospital.

I'm really just not convinced VR has much room to take off in the first place. The Oculus Quest is pretty great, hardware-wise. Even the OS isn't too bad - the problems arise when you try to find anything worth doing. Games are long and hard to get into, VR experiences are short and costly.

I mostly just found myself using the Quest as a way to watch movies on an OLED screen. After a few weeks I just went back to watching TV the normal way and haven't found a reason to go back since. Superhot and Half Life: Alyx was fun, but VR isn't poised for success if it's just going to be another console arena.

If all this division does is pay salaries without causing harm, then Facebook might be overall just a tad less destructive to the world.

Let them keep the cash pouring into A/VR. Hopefully they will not get any market share - as that would be abused.

Meta is out of their depth. They're trying to leapfrog tech and unless they have much more than any of the public has glimpsed, spent too much only to lose momentum.

It's like they want chickens but are intolerant of the eggs and chicks phases.

I would love to see a breakdown of where the money went - are they just paying everyone in the division ~$1,000,000? Are they inventing, from scratch new microprocessors / displays / batteries?

Facebook has a pretty bad habit of canning their internal projects. There's so many products that were close to making it out but were trashed. I used to think Microsoft was bad w/ having 3 different teams competing over the same projects, but at least a product would come out. Facebook teams fight with themselves and have their projects sacrificed like clockwork. Things are probably worst now considering the tech required has a much longer runway (3-5+ years before releasing). They should've just worked on a car.

But yea to answer your question, they invent a lot of stuff that never makes it to the public's eyes. They have whole series of consumer hardware with different levels of innovation they've finished but nobody outside of facebook will ever see it.

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