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Comment by neel8986 | Hacker News Reader

Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sailing to oblivion. Moreover we still don't know how entire VR game will play off given the technical arc. Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.

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Their focus on making Facebook for mobile platforms was smart, their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard. By critical acquisitions I assume you mean Instagram and WhatsApp. Both were anti-competitive attempts to stave off becoming the next MySpace (but also successful). Everything else on the list of acquisitions looks like gambles that did not pay off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Google, Microsoft, and Apple have never bet such a huge chunk of their spending on a single tech that has been so resoundingly mocked. The amount Meta is spending on VR makes the Windows phone look like a drop in the bucket. It's not that they are speculating on a moonshot, it's that they are wasting so much of their money on a single moonshot.

Apple's famously very secretive, so who knows what they've spent money on internally that has never seen the light of day.

There have been rumours for the last 10 years that a bunch of people are working on a self driving and/or electric car, with little to show for it so far. I doubt anyone outside a select few in the company would know how much.

I remember hearing that rumour when they were building a tech center in Yokohama. But all the job listings never mention anything related to self-driving so I always wondered what they actually do there.

Facebook had no real efforts to make their own mobile phone.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/21/mark-zuckerberg-asked-facebook...

They did a brief collaboration with HTC on a custom Android skin back in 2013 but that appears to have been their only major effort in the handheld device space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First?wprov=sfla1

This is wrong, I worked there at the time and a lot of people were working on the phone project. It got kind of scrapped before it saw the light of day though.

> Apple have never bet such a huge chunk of their spending on a single tech that has been so resoundingly mocked.

I guess the 90's don't count anymore.

I mean...not really?

It's not particularly helpful to think of Apple before Jobs' return as iCEO and Apple afterward as the same company. His leadership philosophy and his vision for the company were so completely different than Gil Amelio and his fellow suits, any attempt to draw conclusions based on things that happened during that period is going to be an exercise in futility.

Unless, of course, all you want to do is score points dunking on Apple. Which has been a beloved pastime of many tech people for about 40 years now.

Apple in the 90s didn’t net itself on a single product.

Apple bet on a ton of products. Then they almost all failed to generate good returns, whether good, bad or average.

> their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard

Meta was in its infancy when the mobile hardware revolution was happening. Do you really think they stood a chance of creating their own hardware platform while simultaneously adapting their existing software platform to the new paradigm? According to a google search they had 850 employees in 2008. Apple had 32000.

> It's not that they are speculating on a moonshot, it's that they are wasting so much of their money on a single moonshot

And yet Google is constantly trounced on this very site for never committing and constantly shutting down promising products. Armchair critics will never be satisfied and Zuck is wise to ignore them.

> Do you really think they stood a chance of creating their own hardware platform while simultaneously adapting their existing software platform to the new paradigm?

Then they should have realised that it was a bad idea.

They did, and therefore never made a phone.

It's easy to look like a visionary leader when people will rewrite history for you. Facebook was famously late to mobile and almost missed the boat. Luckily, they had the resources to plow into catching up around 2012.

I am talking about jumping to create a family of mobile apps that dominate the data day to day usage of mobile. They lost their chance of owning a mobile OS which they are suffering till now

Yes, that is what I was talking about. They were late creating a mobile presence for Facebook. Then of course, Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquisitions. Definitely good acquisitions, but pretty obvious ones. They luckily had plenty of money at the time to plow into the already successful Insta and WhatsApp mobile apps.

IIRC the Facebook "mobile app" was originally just a glorified webview that was slow and didn't integrate well with the native experience. It took them a couple years to fix most things.

And their UI (mobile and web) still suck for lesser used features to this day. Not the "doesn't look good" kind of suck, but "they forgot to put in the submit button" kind suck.

Who were the mobile pioneers who blazed the trail? Where are they now?

Let's exclude Apple and Google from the competition because they own the mobile platforms.

They own the mobile platforms because they blazed the trail as you put it. That was the prize they were competing for, Meta was late with the HTC First / Facebook phone, and so they lost. Of course they would have liked to own their own little mobile fiefdom, they are incredibly valuable platforms

Palm, Blackberry and Windows PocketPC blazed the trail. iOS and Android were relatively latecomers that arrived with a more competitive product (iOS because it was much better than the previous generation, and Android because it borrowed the ideas from iOS and was free.)

Apple and Android both steal ideas from each other.

capacitive touch and momentum scrolling were the differentiating factors.

Windows CE 4 was way ahead of iphoneOS 1, 5 years earlier.

I've never thought of momentum scrolling as a paradigm shift. But now that I think about it, it is a pretty amazing feature.

I honestly don't think there is a room for a third commercial mobile platform, after Apple started the smartphone market, and Google caught up soon enough after. Even strong and entrenched players like Palm, Nokia (with Tizen) and even BlackBerry could not hold.

In 2007, Facebook was way, way less mighty, and by 2012, it was late.

Speaking of Windows Phone: it had great hardware and good, innovative software. It's Microsoft's bureaucratic ineptitude that killed it, not its (possible lack of) merit.

Apple didn't start the smartphone market. There were smartphones for many years prior to the iPhone.

Apple started what we would recognize as the modern smartphone market.

Before that, we had things like the danger hiptop and blackberries. Incomparable.

Windows Mobile was more advanced compared to the initial iPhone in almost every way (to be fair it wasn't a particularly useful device on launch). Of course the whole is more than just a sum of it's parts.

> Even strong and entrenched players like Palm, Nokia (with Tizen) and even BlackBerry could not hold.

What do you mean Nokia with Tizen? Tizen was Samsung's attempt at continuing with Linux after Nokia abandoned MeeGo.

Nokia was the massive smartphone market leader with Symbian, but was a hardware company at heart and couldn't keep up with Android which ate its lunch by giving all the competitors a free, competitive operating system.

Before Android came along the competition didn't really have much choice as they were even worse at software than Nokia was. Who knows, without Android the landscape might still today be Nokia & Apple sharing the market -- or maybe Windows Phone would've managed to become the second system.

Was it really Microsoft that killed Windows phone? Or was it simply just too late. By the time it was really available I'm not sure there was actually a chance for a third platform to survive.

If it's the delay that killed it, that's really still an unforced error.

They had Windows CE in the 90s, and Windows Mobile in the 2000s.

They were in a good place to be able to release a smartphone in time.

They were too early, and then too late. CE and Mobile just never had devices with enough processing power or good enough hardware UI to make them viable and enticing for developers.

In retrospect, after understanding more about tech history, I suspect the leadership of Steve Ballmer during the vital period in the late 2000s and Bill Gates' spending less time on Microsoft probably had something to do with this as well.

According to reported stories, Bill used to be really good at understanding how to squeeze the last drop of performance from slow hardware, a vital skill to have in the 1980s, yet subsequently became less important when desktops became fast enough. If they had Bill Gates leading the technical direction of the mobile OSes, the extra focus on speed optimization might have been what would have allowed Microsoft to do better during the smartphone wars.

All speculation though.

Windows Phone had enough ardent and faithful followers even after it was officially discontinued.

I'd say that it's the moving too slowly and not focussing on getting some key apps working on WinMobile did not let the platform win some mobile.

Their versioning seemed like a big problem and caused a loss of faith in the platform. They had an incompatible version jump and then another odd thing going on around the next version.

Not sure if you were using Facebook in 2012/2013 but their implementation was horrendous. Everyone bemoaned its lack of true mobile first design while other apps were responsive and sleek.

I did (occasionally), and I agree.

Snapchat? Instagram?

His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning

Wha? This is revisionist history.

Facebook was very late to having a mobile app. It was widely ridiculed for a very long time for not having an iPhone app, and when it did finally get one, it was so bad that it was practically unusable for at least two years.

I remember a number of friends and family members giving up on Facebook because its app was so slow, bad, and buggy, even on the newest phones. My wife upgraded to a new phone just because the Facebook app was so awful, and she was so disappointed to find out that the problem wasn't the phone, it was Facebook.

They were betting on web technologies instead of native, which was quoted as early Mark Zuckerberg's biggest mistake [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-bigges...

Technically Apple made the same mistake but realized and mostly fixed it in half a year or so.

The problem of VR goes beyond hardware innovation: most people don’t want to completely shut themselves off from the world for hours on end.

I have friends that got married, never had kids, and spend large chunks of their free time in MMORPGs, League of Legends, and a seemingly endless array of virtual-based entertainment. They also seem to get a lot of personal meaning and satisfaction from nerd pop culture like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings which is evidence that their rich fantasy lives have such deep meaning for them.

So I find it totally plausible that a huge amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world, provided it wasn’t clunky and caused headaches.

> So I find it totally plausible that a huge amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world

I, on the other hand, know nobody that uses virtual worlds. I find it plausible that a tiny amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world. I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.

>I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.

there are 2.5 billion adult gamers in the world. A good percentage of that are partaking in games that easily qualify as virtual worlds.

no personal anecdote needed, huge amounts of people are already spending time in places that qualify as virtual worlds.

Our interfaces are clunky, and you can shift 'virtual world' around to mean something else, but it feels evident to me that this isn't an uncommon pastime/desire among people.

> there are 2.5 billion adult gamers in the world.

I don't think casually playing a mobile game every once in a while translates to going full VR. The amount of gamers that care enough about the medium to buy a console or gaming PC is only around 500 million or so.

I'm an adult gamer, and I also own a Valve Index VR kit.

VR is fun, but has serious limitations. A nice way to take a walk on the rings of Saturn, but no way in hell am I going to trust it with my privacy. And it's totally overkill for something like scrolling cat-meme videos or wishing someone happy birthday via social media.

Plus the Index is pretty good but it still gives me headaches and dizziness after extended periods.

I absolutely think there is more to come with VR, but it's only after there is already a flourishing ecosystem that social media will find its place there, not before.

You're making a giant unsubstantiated leap from "there are 2.5 adult billion gamers in the world" and the idea that the current types of "virtual worlds" means that a significant number of these folks want anything resembling the metaverse.

I am one of those "adult gamers". I even occasionally play VR games with an Oculus Quest. The thought of living substantially more portions of my life "in the metaverse" is pretty much the definition of dystopia for me. I've seen Wall-E, and I'll pass, thanks.

I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.

But people already do.

Email, Facebook, twitter, messaging, slack, all of it, is by no means real, human interaction. It is a step away from that.

Some even say that this type of interaction is so fake, so filled with disinformation, and algorithmic monkeying, that it is toxic poison.

Yet people will be with friends at a restaurant, or hanging out, and so addicted, so unable to stop, that they are constantly be staring at their screen instead of interacting in person!

People cannot help themselves, and people cannot resist addictive platforms.

So sadly, Zuck probably has a good idea. He's probably a bit early, but you can be sure when VR takes a Musk implant, and a simple pair of glasses for full immersion, people will be in VR while having lunch with you.

It’s a huge jump from what you mentioned rather than a “small step away.” (I see you edited your post, but I’m sticking with the original quote) Everything you mentioned can be done in short spurts of time and interwoven with other parts of someones life. VR as it stands today is way too burdensome and all consuming to pull that off. I’m not even getting into the additional hardware costs.

None of those things you mentioned are an immersive virtual world, at least not by how I understand that concept.

Jaron Lanier made an incisive point many years ago. Someone asked him what virtual reality was. "Virtual reality is where you are when you're on the telephone."

I'd extend that to, "Virtual reality is where you are when you're not present in the here-and-now." That encompasses all forms of media, entertainment, and communication with people who aren't in the room with you. The idea that it has anything to do with goggles, 3D graphics, avatars, or Facebook is something some people made up.

I don’t think Lanier is right, regardless, virtual reality and immersive virtual world still sound like two different things.

I can see the point in Lanier argument, however there is a much bigger problem for VR: There is no VR analog to Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube and Co. VR is still very much an activity in which you have to actively engage, you have to find a game that is interesting, load it up and play. You can't just casually doom-scroll in VR and have the algorithm find interesting content for you. There is no app for that. And the retention rates of VR aren't great either, as once you are done with a game, it's quite difficult to find whatever you'll do next.

For all the hype around Metaverse and Zuckerberg wanting 1 billion people in VR, there has been surprisingly little effort in finding out what those people would actual do when they have the headset on.

there has been surprisingly little effort in finding out what those people would actual do when they have the headset on.

True. However, the internet was around for 20+ years, before profit entered. Radio took decades, TV too. These things take time.

Games like Gorilla Tag and VRChat have tens of millions of monthly users. They are on a hardware devices that give most people nausea after 30 mins. Meta has the most popular hardware by far. Seems huge

You have a few friends != large number of people will do the same.

I take the entire breadth of my lived experience when trying to predict the future, and I place high value on anecdata. My strategies have served me well thus far, but if you want to outsource all of your thinking to “experts”, good luck to you.

You don't need to "outsource all of your thinking to experts" to understand that data is not the plural of anecdote.

I, too, know people who met their future spouse online. However, after meeting online, they invariably meet in person before getting married, and then live together after getting married. Even the most plugged-in exemplars of the metaverse can't escape from the desire to interact outside of it.

And yet, while HN places zero trust in anecdata and personal observation, it it critical in real life decision-making. Most mega-successful entrepreneurs got there by trusting their instincts, not disregarding their own observations and instead only ever searching for studies conducted by others.

So while I agree with your point overall, I think here on HN we're too quick to dismiss people's personal stories.

recurring reminder - the original quote is "the plural of anecdote is data" http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-i...

that was an excellent read and dispelled the attempt to recast the phrases negation.

I sold my Quest 2 because I rarely ever used after initial honeymoon period. It was clunky and required too much preparation before put it on.

But I am looking forward to Quest 3. Because I really miss the part of completely shutting off from my surroundings and being transported elsewhere. And really enjoyed random conversations in Table Tennis game and in their VR World thing.

Only after selling it, I realized how much those few minutes in it were worth.

EDIT: Now I think VR/meta is correct long term move.

That's exactly my feeling, I have a valve index and got my parents a quest. It's still new technology, it's still clunky but it will get better and I've had really amazing moments with VR.

I think the Meta beta is correct long term. It might be too early right now but I think long term, it's the correct move

If my friends and I are socializing in VR, it's not exactly shut off from the world. Anyway Hololens and Apple's upcoming XR glasses don't block out the world in the first place.

100 years ago people would have said the same about having the internet in your house and using the computer of an evening.

In the future, if everything you care about is in VR, then not being in VR would be shutting yourself off from the world, the same as not using the internet is shutting oneself off from the world today (for some of us).

A future where "everything that you care about is in VR" describes a hellish dystopia. Even in a future where humans spend large amounts of time in virtual spaces, our meat bodies still appreciate going for walks in the park.

The average American spends something like 3 hours per day watching TV, and upwards of 6 hours of total screen time, according to a quick Google search. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine a world where the screens we use are part of a head-mounted display?

Think about any time you've been on a bus, train or plane -- most people on board are using their phones or tablets. I suspect within this decade it's common for those devices to be supplanted by AR/VR headsets.

> The average American spends something like 3 hours per day watching TV

Would Better Call Saul be a better story in VR?

One of the things that makes shows and movies good is tight editing and focus; a VR system where I can look around is the antithesis of that.

Same way I feel about open world games like GTA V vs. something like Bioshock which is highly linear but also highly directed.

But FWIW I'm totally with you about the airplane headset, never have I wanted to be somewhere else then when I'm on a plane...

To the defence of VR, most of the experiences encourage standing up and moving. Whereas laptops, desktop monitors, phones are back / neck / arm-killing machines, as ergonomics are the last thing companies are thinking about and customer does not really care until they start having health problems.

To be fair Meta's VR headsets are pretty heavy, which is also bad for the neck, but evolutional pressure will bring the futures headsets' weight down, as ergonomics is on a critical path for these devices adoption.

A future where "everything that you care about is in VR" describes a hellish dystopia

Isn't that the way it is now? Used to be, you'd all get together at the town hall, to discuss problems with the city.

Now people use twitter and Facebook, and community involvement is at an all time low.

We're already in VR version 1. Nothing online is "real"!

In VR2 people will still go for walks in the park, but just as now, where everone is walking and staring at their phone, people will be in VR2 while walking their dog.

I quit social media in 2012 (including FB properties like Whatsapp), but I'm still active on many forum/aggregator sites like Reddit and HN

Ten years in I def feel like I've cut myself off from the world in a significant way. I feel like my Boomer parents now, seeing local events advertised in traditional media instead of on Facebook or in some feed.

The _major_ upside is that I am pretty out of the loop with so much meme-based misinformation and influence. It's crazy to see what people are consuming daily.

I just really hope that VR doesn't go the same way. The 90s cyberpunk vision was you'd jack into this wild west and have access to everything. The current reality is that you're just getting another Marc Zuckerberg-esque curated reality. Thanks but no thanks.

For every success story comparable to the "internet" there are dozens or way more technologies and ideas which led nowhere.

To be fair it's not that I'm doubting VR in general just Facebook's vision (or lack of one) of what the Metaverse is supposed to be.

Also who wants a large pair of goggles strapped to their face? It’s such a chore to take it on and off when you can just look away from a screen.

VR belongs in the 80s

That's solvable, just add proper stereo pass-through cameras to turn the VR headset into an AR headset. The Lenovo Mirage Solo[1] had that four years ago, due to the death of the whole Daydream platform it didn't see much use outside of YoutubeVR, but there it works great. You just hit a button and you can see the world around you while watching Youtube.

Quest2 has been adding similar functionality over the last year, though the image quality of the pass-through still leaves a lot to be desired, but that can be fixed in future headsets.

Depths sensors will also make they way into headsets sooner or later and allow much more flexible integration between real world and virtual objects. Hololens could do that years ago, but the VR space still needs to do some catch up.

[1] https://www.uploadvr.com/mirage-solo-is-getting-pass-through...

No, the problem is you can't really move in the VR environment with current-generation products, so that ruins the illusion. But I think Apple is on the right track in betting on AR rather than VR.

Meta's other problem is that while it owns an overwhelming share of VR headsets thanks to subsidies, it is a pitiful also-ran in services with Horizon compared to the real leaders, Fortnite and Minecraft.

the problem isn't in VR per se. the problem is the current iterations of VR hw/sw.

while quest 2 has solved some problems, there are still hurdles to usability. but these hurdles aren't inherent to VR.

> Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.

How many decades and hardware cycles does it take for this prediction to go away? Billions has been poured into VR and it's still as much a novelty and fad as ever.

Industry titans can still make mistakes and it's important to recognise them. The examples you give are decades old. I agree that VR may yet turn around but at the moment needs dictate a pivot in focus.

> Moreover we still don't know how entire VR game will play off

I'm not sure it even matters as it appears the game was really a way to find a funding stream for future hardware development to get them where they really want to go. Kind of like how Netflix mailed DVDs around until they could achieve their goal of a streaming service.

> Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.

They already achieved something like a 10x cost reduction with the Quest in a few HW generations.

I think their worse mistake was tying up Oculus devices to Facebook accounts. Oculus should have stayed a separate platform with minimal ties to Facebook with it's own social features.

How requiring a Facebook account to use Oculus was their worst mistake? I get it that a few people might be bothered by that, but most people don't care.

It’s a story that could have gone in different directions. Mostly Facebook was lucky to be in the right time and place and didn’t have an entrenched competitor. You could have the kind of brain Eliezer Yudkowsky is afraid of and try to start Facebook in 2023 and fail, fail, fail.

Sheryl Sandburg deserve a huge amount of credit for making Facebook a sustainable business, something Zuck floundered at previously.

A person who could brilliantly take advantage of a an opportunity once might have no generalizable talent to create another opportunity out of thin air.

> Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.

Yes, especially if you consider that now AI can create entire 3D worlds at near-zero cost ...

I completely agree with this and i believe lots of innovation in meta is happening here. The biggest reason for VR not taking off is the VR world at present looks funny and old like 90s video games and headset is heavy and clunky.

This can change completely if they can increase the resolution of headset, make them 3x lighter and with jaw dropping graphics created by generative AI streamed from cloud.

That's the thing I am aghast it has not yet percolated through the tech commentorship. The AI advances of yesterday completely have turned upside down the VR/AR/XR equation. (Note the use of past tense)

Meta isn't investing billions into VR alone. They're also investing billions into AR, metaverse, etc. Read their filings & earnings report; it's all in there.

The funny part is, if they actually invested more on investing in VR, they might actually get to AR faster.

In the long run AR will be subsumed by VR (by having cameras and displaying the real world within the VR experience, with whatever augmentations dictated by the software).

Plus and Windows Phone (and Zune) were decent though. I think they just blundered the launches or marketing.

I agree. There has been tremendous whiplash in the markets. We went from free money and “new paradigms” to QT belt tightening and broken dreams. If people think they could lead better than Zuck, they should start a company and beat him.

Wasn’t Facebook late to the mobile party insisting on their web app instead of creating a decent native app for the longest time?

They sure were. They bet the farm on HTML5 but ended up having to change their minds when it didn't work.

When I joined FB in 2013 people told me it was a really bad move as they didn't get mobile.

Don’t know how metaverse stuff will pan out, but Quest 3 should be a pretty big leap forward in VR tech.

The leaked specs of the Quest 3 don't look like a big leap.

2-3x performance increase is not big?

2-3x performance in 3 years isn't a big leap

Average yearly performance increase is about 20% at best. And closer to 10%

I think if we get a big leap performance wise it will be from Apple. The performance/power consumption could be a game changer for VR/AR.

Meta is too dependend on chip manufacturers like Qualcomm

Cheaper, faster, much better optics: any two of those would be good, all three is incredible.

Cheaper? Compared to the pro not the Quest 2. And the resolution is still too low.

Better than the Quest 2 but not a big leap

Marketing will take care of that.

Mark “bet the company on HTML5” ten years ago and backed off later.

Things happen.

The problem is that Meta has too MUCH power.

> making critical acquisitions

like who/what?

Instagram

and Whatsapp

Worth 600b until it isn't

It was worth 300b in January

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