Meta rebuffs Google's virtual reality tie-up proposal
reuters.com
reuters.com
(And let's acknowledge that DeX is completely Samsung's work, and they really put a lot of work to make Android tablets usable.)
No one in their right mind should bet on building on a new tech like this from Google. What would Meta's options be if Google abandons it?
Just not worth the risk.
I’m not claiming that Meta won’t be Silo’d off by making their own. But Google is not going to be the one that should be trusted to make a platform for multiple devices.
Like it would be great if we had such a platform from a company that won’t abandon it in a few months.
But instead we are likely just going to have Silo’d systems.
The data that comes off of AR devices is just way too important and FB and Apple started investing early.
When google hedged after they failed with glass, by investing in ML and then putting half ass effort into Tango they gave the market to Apple with the Metaio etc… purchases.
I can’t stress how badly Magic Leap fucked the AR startup ecosystem up.
Meanwhile Zuck was smart enough to realize AR was early and built the VR market via Oculus knowing Oculus was just V0 for AR.
Meta and Apple won and there’s no way for a startup or even Google to compete in AR and thus the most important future data market
I think Meta is certainly ahead, but they are burning cash hard. Apple is just getting started.
The Apple brand is just too dominant that losing on AR doesn’t mean Apple sinks
Alternatively Meta doesn’t have such a position so losing on AR would be existential if they need it to beat Apple
On their watches yeah they've been pretty bad. Still not great now even with the Samsung collaboration.
If this manipulation is true, would you still say he's right?
Let's take a look at the pandemic. The government was handing out free money. People were stuck at home. Why did big tech hire every bit of talent that applied and let them do nothing for two years?
The same reason that they over hire now, and have dumb roles like "button engineers". The same reason why experienced FAANG engineers leave and build bloated systems with more servers (and problems) than users.
The strategy is one to abort competition. To soften potential competitors with cushy jobs and stupid pay days. TO indoctrinate them into a way of building and thinking that isnt wholly compatible with startups.
What happens when these processes misfire. You get what's app. 30 engineers and 30 servers at the time FB bought them (or some stupidly low number, I'm close). Your average post FAANG engineer would have 2 dozen people running kafka and kuberneties with a multi million dollar cloud spend and have given most of the company away to VC's.
Am I suggesting there is a cabal? No, this is the 'natural order' and has been going on since Edison. The distinction is one of nuance. If you have the stomach for risk it is even easier to succeed now than it was in Edisons time (software isnt physical goods and hardware, its application not creation).
Edit: peter thiel 100k dropout offer is likely an overt example of this idea put into action.
I asked about various amendments to the offer, like a starting bonus or compensation for missing January's RSU pricing, and my recruiter gave me zero BS, she just said they couldn't do it without a competing offer. (And all of my competing offers were roughly half of Meta's, so they would only undermine my effort)
I spent 1 week in team matching before being given an hiring manager interview. He passed on me, and then about 4 days later my recruiter said they were now doing hiring "war rooms" and another manager had approved to hire me without a matching interview. Yes there was a 5 business day ultimatum, but again, this is a job offering nearly double the current market rate.
I had a great experience with Meta and I would recommend it to anyone (just based on the interviewing/recruiting/comp aspects, naturally I haven't started working there yet)
> she just said they couldn't do it without a competing offer
let me ask you - were they going to 'actually' see a copy of offer(s)?
First google has been asleep and not contributing much to XR for several very important years.
Second meta's version of android (the vr shell is my focus) is an awkward pile of jank and fail. It doesn't feel well done in practical terms.
I like android and what facebook has done is just... bad android.
That said they've been helping moving forward in positive ways with openxr/webxr standards implementations work.
I look forward to a large pile of opensource being contributed to the larger XR community by things getting mainlined into android.
We'll see what google can manage these days with their samsung headset incoming.
Obviously, this is important to them/him. And it certainly makes sense.
But didn't Zuck's review of the Apple Vision Pro compare it's "closed platform" and Meta's is an "open platform"? I never understood how that aligned with their needs or their actions.
And yeah, Meta's Quest platform is relatively open, at least compared to Apple. Probably wouldn't say it's fully open though.
See the recent article where Apple says they'll block porn apps however they can on vision pro. Not cool, it's a really great tech for people with an open mind. SexTech is a fast growing market and imposing morals on your users isn't a nice thing to do.
On quest you can just sideload such apps (though unfortunately sidequest no longer allows them in their store either after they started working with meta). Nevertheless you can still just sideload the APK directly even through sidequest. Which works fine.
The result of dominance games is stagnation. Innovation happens only as a side effect during regime change.
In addition as IBM and Samsung have learned, the OS vendor, not the hardware manufacturer, is the one who controls the platform.
And I don't mean "stability" as in, "doesn't crash." That is nice and needed, of course. I more mean it in "doesnt change."
And I get that you don't want to be in the market of custom software all the way down. I have grown rather distrustful on Google's ability to not drop things. Their API discipline is not at all pleasant for people that rely on them.
WebXR has the potential to be this shared platform. But certain features such as immersive navigation that would facilitate this may be being deliberately held back or neglected.
Google is more than likely to terminate the project within 2 years, which they've demonstrated time and time again.