Love how everyone is romanticizing his engineering mindset. But have we already forgotten that he was even more passionate about the metaverse which, as far as I can tell, was a 50B failure?
If Apple didn’t try and fail with Newton[0] (which was too early to the market for many reasons, both tech-related and not), we might’ve not had iPhone today. The engineering mindset would be to analyze how and why it happened the way it did, assess whether you can address those issues well, decide whether to proceed again or not (and how), and then execute. Obsessing over a perfect track record is the opposite of the engineering mindset imo.
For all we know, VRChat as a concept of that kind is a local maximum, and imo it wont scale well to genpop. Not claiming this as an objective fact, but as a hypothesis that I personally believe to be very likely truthful. Think of it as a dead branch of evolution, where if you want to go further than that local maximum, you gotta break out of it using an entirely different approach.
I like VRChat, but thinking that a random person living in the mainstream who isnt into that type of geeky online stuff is gonna be convinced of VRChat being the ultimate metaverse experience is just foolish.
At that point, your choices are: (1) build a VRChat clone and hit that same local maximum but slightly higher at best or (2) develop something entirely different to get out of that local maximum, but risk failing (since it is a totally novel thing) and coming short of being at least as successful as VRChat. Zuck took the second option, and I respect that.
Just making a VRChat Meta Edition clone would imo give Meta much better numbers in the short-term (than their failed Meta Horizons did), but imo long-term that approach would lead them nowhere. And it seems like Meta is more interested in capturing the first-mover (into the mainstream) advantage heavy.
And honestly, I think it is better off this way. Just like if someone is making yet another group chat, i would prefer they went balls to the wall, tried to rethink things from scratch, and made a group chat app that is unlike any other ones out there. Could all of their novel approaches fail? Yes, much more likely than if they made another slack clone with a different color scheme. But the important part is, it also has a much higher chance to get the state of their niche oit of the local maximum.
Examples: Twitter could’ve been just another blog aggregator, Tesla could’ve been just another gas-powered Lotus Elise (with the original roadsters literally being just their custom internals slotted into a Lotus body), Microsoft would’ve been stuck with MS-DOS and not went into the “app as the main OS” thing (which is what they did with Windows).
Apple would’ve been relegated to a legacy of Apple II and iPod (with a dash of macbook relevancy), and rememebered as the company that made this ultra popular mp3 player before that whole niche died. Airpods (that everyone laughed at initially and lauded as an impractical pretentious purchase) are massive now, with every holdout that I personally know who finally got them recently going “i cannot believe how convenient it is, i should’ve gotten them earlier”, but it was also a similar “who needs this, they are solving a problem nobody has, everyone prefers wired with tons of better options” take[0].
If you want to get out of a perceived local maximum and break into the mainstream, you gotta try brand new approaches that would likely fail. Going “omg cannot even beat that existing competitor that’s been running for years” is kinda pointless in this case, because competing with them directly by making just a better and more successful clone of their product was never the goal. I don’t doubt even for a second that if Meta tried that, they would’ve likely accomplished it.
And for the naysayers who don’t see Meta ever breaking things out of a local maximum, just look at the Oculus Quest line. Everyone was laughing at them initially for going with the standalone device approach, but Quest has become a massive hit, with tons of people of all kinds buying it (not just people with massive gaming rigs).
0. And yes, removal of the audiojack somewhat speeded up the adoption, but I just used an adapter with zero discomfort for a year or two until i got airpods myself (and would’ve still continued using the adapter if I just didnt flatout preferred airpods in general).
Apple photos and FaceTime are good products for sharing information without ruining your attention span or bring evil. Facebook could’ve been like that.
Maybe I am an outlier, but when in a conversation about work-related things someone asks “what do you like to do in your free time”, I believe the implication here is that there is a silent “…to do in your free time [outside of work]”.
Answering that question with more stuff related to work project typically falls somewhere on the spectrum between pandering to the audience and cringe.
No idea how this concept can even count as novel on HN, where a major chunk of users that are software devs keep talking about hobbies like woodworking/camping/etc. (aka hobbies that are typically as far removed from the digital realm as possible).
Imo Zuck talking about MMA being his personal free time hobby is about as odd as a software dev talking about being into woodworking. In other words, not at all.
He sees the metaverse as the entire shared online space that evolves into a more multi-user collaborative model with more human-centric input/output devices than a computer and phone. It includes co-presence, mixed reality, social sites like Instagram and Facebook as well as online gaming, real-world augments, multiuser communities like Roblox, and "world apps" like VRChat or Horizons.
Access methods may be via a VR headset, or smart glasses, or just sensors that alert you to nearby augmented sites that you can then access on your phone - think Pokemon Go with gyms located at historical real-world sites.
That's what $50B has been spent on, and it's definitely a work in progress. But it sure doesn't seem dead based on the fact that more Quest headsets have been sold than this gen's Xboxes; Apple released Vision Pro; Rayban Smart Glasses are selling pretty well; new devices are planned from Google, Valve, and others; and remote work is an unkillable force.
The online and "real" worlds are only getting more connected, and it seems like a smart bet to try to drive what the next generation looks like. I wouldn't say the $50B was spent efficiently, but I understand that forging a new path means making lots of missteps. You still get somewhere new though, and if it's a worthwhile destination then many people will be following right behind you.
AR glasses in a spectacles form factor was the goal, it’s just to get there a VR headset includes solving a lot of the problems you need to solve for the glasses to work at all.
Apple made the same bet.
But that said, I don't think it matters. I don't know anybody who hasn't been wrong about something, or made a bad bet at times. Even if he is wrong about everything else (which he's not, because plenty of important open source has come out of facebook), that doesn't change the extreme importance that is Llama and Meta's willingness to open things up. It's a wonderful gift they have given to humanity that has only barely started.
He's well positioned to take that market when it eventually matures a bit. Once the tech gets there, say in a decade we might see most people primarily consume content via VR and phones. That's movies, games, TV, sporting events, concerts.
For me the tech isn't they're yet. I'd buy a Quest with an HDMI input today if they sold it. But for some reason these are two different products
Similarly, I could imagine sitting next to my daughter, who is 2,500 miles away at college, watching the name together on a virtual screen we both share. And then playing mini-golf or table tennis together.
Different tools are appropriate for different use cases. Don't dismiss a hammer because it's not good at driving screws.
Co-watching TV? Big Screen: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software
Mini-Golf? Walkabout Mini Golf: https://www.mightycoconut.com/minigolf
Table Tennis? Eleven Table Tennis: https://elevenvr.com/en/
All are amazing, polished experiences in VR that give you a sense of being "present" with someone a continent away.
Tablet PC (first iteration was in the early 90s!), Pocket PC, WebTV and Media Center PC (Microsoft first tried Smart TVs in the late 90s! There wasn't any content to watch and most people didn't have broadband, oops), Xbox, and the numerous PC standards they pushed for (e.g. mandating integrated audio on new PCs), smart watches (SPOT watch, look it up!), and probably a few others I'm forgetting.
You'll notice in most of those categories, they moved too soon and others who came later won the market.
It is still possible that VR and Generative AI can join in some synergy.
If you could have predicted that Internet was going to change our lives and that most people would spend most of their waking hours living their lives on the Internet people probably would have told you that you were a fool in the early days.
The same is true with this prediction of VR. If you think in the next decade that VR is not going to be the home for more and more people then you are wrong.
Apple made the same bet too and had to capitulate to a VR headset + cameras in the end.
The Zuck difference is he pivoted to AI at the right time, Apple didn’t.
Will metaverse be a failure? Maybe. But Apple doesn't think so to the tune of $100B invested so far, which is pretty good validation there is some value there.
Nobody wants to tell the boss his pet project sucks - or to get their buddies laid off. And with Facebook's $100 billion in revenue, nobody's going to notice the cost of a few thousand engineers.
Apple famously brought the iPhone into existence without any prior R&D or failed attempts to build similar devices.
and yours did? This comment, Christian?
>>I swear, this feels like people get paid to write positive stuff about him?
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>you're just snarky and nothing else
Please re-read your own comment. See above.
>So get off my back
Absolutely not. You said something that was decidedly ignorant(how dare people praise x good thing done by omg horrible y people!), and I called you out on it. I expect better discussion and people skills from someone who holds position of a CTO rather than just "haha you're all paid shills!"