Hacker News Reader

Comment by atrus | Hacker News Reader

Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision.

Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990.

Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to create the iPhone, in any of its varations? Absolutely not, there too much research, too much to invent, too much to program and not nearly enough talent and money for one company to manage.

View on HN

I think you make a good point but also, honestly, VR seemed so beyond Facebook's depth. Zuck, IMO, was reaching for a pie on a table at the other end of the room. I understand the whole point of acquiring Oculus was to get allies on that table at the other end but---excuse my corpo-speak here---I don't think Oculus ever had synergy with the rest of Facebook's business.

This is just my 2c as an outside observer, software engineer ofc. I'm sure some MBA could make a case for said synergy. But it made sense to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks. But Oculus?!?!?! IMO Facebook had a better chance opening a cloud computing division.

So, achieving the Metaverse dream with the money Zuck has spent was always gonna be a tall order at this point but if anyone could've made it work, it wasn't gonna be a social media company.

> because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks

Another point of view: antitrust. What Zuck did with Whatsapp at a minimum ought to be highly illegal. He's a black hat hacker from his history and WA is more of the same. Brian Acton said "it's time, delete Facebook". That's not mutual benefit, that's conquering

Haha FB Cloud sounds so wild to imagine

On the hardware side, sure, not being able to solve the hardware challenges always seemed like a real possibility.

On the gaming side though, other companies succeeded in making profitable games. Meta seems to have just spent and spent, without getting a game people wanted to play.

They did though! From what I understand from people who made those profitable games is that Facebook funded, either though investments or grants most vr games out there. Even ones not owned by the company (like beat sabre, batman, deadpool, etc).

The problem is, like someone else mentioned, the company itself. Facebook is a middleman company. other people make stuff, showcase it on one of their properties (insta, marketplace, whatever), and then go back to the people actually doing stuff.

Remember, even Apple had the Apple Newton

VR seems cool but imo just sucks as a product no matter how it has been used. Like who is the market for? Gamers? They might be trying to play for the next 12 hours straight. They don't want to waive their arms around and turn their head.

Nongamers? And you are going to somehow get nongamers to shell out for the required hardware for this casual half interest pursuit of theirs? Doesn't work.

I feel like zuck has been billionaire for too long to probably understand this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com