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Comment by SirFatty | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg said it.

https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mark-zuckerberg-plans-to-repla...

In the ~8 years since I worked there, Zuckerberg announced that we'd all be spending our 8 hour workdays in the Metaverse, and when that didn't work out, he pivoted to crypto currency.

He's just trend-chasing, like all the other executives who are afraid of being left behind as their flagship product bleeds users...

We gotta put AI Crypto in the Blockchain Metaverse!

Have they bled users?

Apparently not, according to their quarterly earnings reports: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092227/facebook-product...

The core Facebook product? Yeah.

Across all products, maybe not - Instagram appeals to a younger demographic, especially since they turned it into a TikTok clone. And WhatsApp is pretty ubiquitous outside of the US (even if it is more used as a free SMS replacement than an actual social network).

Growth in monthly actives across Facebook seems to have slowed but is still increasing--not bleeding users--from data I found through Q4 2023.

With 3 billion monthly actives and China being excluded, it's hard to expect a ton of growth since it is a major fraction of the remaining world population. There are bots etc. but they are one of the stricter networks with requiring photos of your ID and stuff a lot more often than others.

Keep in mind that Meta pulls something of a fast one here, because a lot of instagram accounts end up creating an attached Facebook account (so that they can share Reels across both platforms). I don't have current insider information, but as of 2019 they were heavily using instagram sign-ups to shore up the Facebook numbers.

Zuckerberg, as always, is well known for making excellent business decisions that lead to greater sector buy in. The Metaverse is going great.

On the other hand, Instagram has been called one of the greatest acquisitions of all time only below the Apple/Next acquisition.

That was 13 years ago. How are things going more recently?

$53 million in 2012 and $62.36 billion in profit last year…

Really, that's what you're going with, arguing against the business acumen of the world's second richest person, and the only one at that scale with individual majority control over their company?

As for the Metaverse, it was always intended as a very long-term play which is very early to be judged, but as an owner of a Quest headset, it's already going great for me.

Yes? I don't understand what is so outrageous about that. Most business decisions are not made by the CEO, and the ones we know are directly a result of him have been poor.

Howard Hughes was one of the biggest business successes of the 20th century, on par with, if not exceeding, the business acumen of the zucc. Fantastically rich, hugely successful, driven, talented, all that crap.

Anyway he also acquired RKO Pictures and led it to its demise 9 years later. In aviation he had many successes, he also had the spruce goose. He bought in to TWA then got forced out of its management.

He died as a recluse, suffering from OCD and drug abuse, immortalized in a Simpsons episode with Mr. Burns portraying him.

People can have business acumen, and sometimes it doesn't work out. Past successes doesn't guarantee future ones. Maybe the metaverse will eventually pay off and we'll all eat crow, or maybe (and this is the one I'm a believer of) it'll be a huge failure, an insane waste of money, and one of the spruce geese of his legacy.

Meta's success for the past 10 years had more to do with Cheryl Sandburg and building a culture that chases revenue metrics than whatever side project Zuckerberg is doing. He also misunderstands the product they do have. He said he didn't see TikTok as a competitor because they "aren't social," but Meta's products have been attention products, not social products, for a long time now.

Are you really claiming that it's inherently wrong to argue against somebody who is rich?

No, not at all, it's absolutely cool to argue against specific decisions he made, but I just wanted to reject this attempt at sarcasm about his overall decision-making:

>Zuckerberg, as always, is well known for making excellent business decisions that lead to greater sector buy in.

If we're being honest here. A lot of the current technocrats made one or two successful products or acquisitions, and more or less relied on those alone to power everything else. And they weren't necessarily the best, they were simple first. Everything else is incredibly hit or miss, so I wouldn't call them visionaries.

Apple was almost the one exception, but the post Jobs era definitely had that cultural branding stagnate at best.

Yes, this is exactly why I think my comment was fair. Meta itself is where it is because it was first and got initial traction. Now it has an effective level of vendor lock-in. It's the equivalent of saying someone who won at slots on their first round is an expert gambler because they got a multi-million dollar payout, even if they've then subsequently lost every other turn on the machine.

The Metaverse is actually still a thing? With, like, people in it and stuff? Who knew?

Well, we aren't yet "in it", but there's a lot of fun to be had with VR (and especially AR) activities. For example, I love how Eleven Table Tennis allows me to play ping pong with another person online, such that the table and their avatar appear to be in my living room. I don't know if this is "the future", but I'm pretty confident that these sorts of interactions will get more and more common, and I think that Meta is well positioned to take advantage of this.

My big vision for this space is the integration of GenAI for creating 3d objects and full spaces in realtime, allowing the equivalent of The Magic School Bus, where a teacher could guide students on a virtual experience that is fully responsive and adjustable on the fly based on student questions. Similarly, playing D&D in such a virtual space could be amazing.

Have you heard the term survivorship bias? Billionaires got so rich by being outliers, for better or worse. Even if they were guaranteed to be the best just going all in with one action in their portfolio isn't even what their overall strategy. Zuckerberg can afford to blow a few billion on a flop because it is only about 2% of his net worth. Notably, even he while poised and groomed for overconfidence by past successes and yes-men doesn't trust his own business acumen all that much!

I'm sorry for your sunk cost. I bought an early-ish Oculus Rift myself.

Obviously the people developing AI and spending all of their money on it (https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-invest-up-65-bln-cap...) are going to say this. It's not a useful signal unless people with no direct stake in AI are making this change (and not just "planning" it). The only such person I've seen is the Gumroad CEO (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962345), and that was a pretty questionable claim from a tiny company with no full-time employees.

Planning to and succeeding at are very different things

I'd be willing to bet that "planning to" means the plan is being executed.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/meta-starts-eliminatin...

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