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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy

What do you mean?

Go watch the launch of the metaverse and consider who would actually want to spend time and money there. Meta is trying to own vr like apple owns it's app store. But apple make a great set of products, that I don't like personally, but they are objectively good. Facebook is hanging on because it's got early market share from a long time ago, and it bought all it's competitors rather than out flank them. So it's lazy in mind and spirit and this is showing up in it's offerings in vr.

Firing 10k people on the back of other layoffs just obscures that for a while.

Boomers were responsible for the late 90s VR hype train.

This latest round is a re-run.

VR was talked up like crazy then and fizzled.

Zuckerberg is old enough to have been an impressionable kid when that was going on. I remember being very excited about it all.

I honestly don't remember a lot of VR hype but I've never been much of gamer so maybe I wasn't paying much attention. Various organizations, including the MIT Media Lab, have been playing around with VR for a long time but I don't recall VR being particularly notable in the dot-com runup.

I remember installing the VRML plugin for Netscape and how it slowed my dual-CPU SPARCStation 20 to a crawl, but it was OMG The Future! and then one day nobody ever mentioned it again.

> Boomers were responsible for the late 90s VR hype train.

Sure. I'm just not sure I understand how the current focus/hype by Mark Zuckerberg/Meta can be THE cause for VR to fail (which is what was asserted by the person I was responding to).

I mean, are there literally nobody younger who is hyped about VR? Maybe not!

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