Comment by tyleo
5 days ago
Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.
They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.
I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing more probably just makes your company look bad (you're spending more to get the same revenue). SO instead you have to take that money and make bets. But not just any bets. You need a bet that (a) matters if it pays off, and (b) looks favourable compared to the core business. So you buy Mcafee and Altera and MobilEye, 5G was the future once...
So to take the Meta example, they need something that is going to have revenue upside similar to Meta advertising revenue (one of the most profitable things in the universe), and that has better margins that the advertising business (basically impossible).So the only logical thing to do is to make grotesquely large bets on things that are extremely speculative. You can't bet on things that are well known - because nothing known has the properties from earlier that you're looking for, and you can't bet small because you've got to convince people you're the pay off is of a similar size to your existing business.
In Intel's case they lost focus on the core business and so that died and their other bets didn't matter because the core business was dead. With Meta the core business in't dead, but it's only a matter of time before it's seriously threatened and so they're going to attack that threat with everything they've got - and they have a tonne of resources.
Man, activist shareholders should really start demanding that companies return money to them rather than setting it on fire with vanity projects.
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Sounds a lot like Google as well
But Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products. Meta's AI research hasn't produced anywhere near as many state of the art products /revolutionary achievements.
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In 2026 we need to update our mental model of Google. Google has been wildly successful at adding diversification. Around 40% of Google’s profit (depending on the quarter) comes from non-search income.
They build a wildly successful cloud platform, they’re expanding their subscription services, they’ve got enterprise offerings, etc
The trick is that Google accepted that none of their other business would likely have the margins and volume that search has, but they did it anyways.
Or you could just return the profits to shareholders.
Spending tens of billions on something that was never going to work is certainly meta.
They already attacked it with everything they've got lmao
As in, in 2012. They outright replaced people's email addresses in their profile (makes it harder to reach people outside the walled garden, makes it harder to transfer your credentials to a competing service) and I've heard Google+ links got blocked
Zuckerberg is many things, not everything he's accused of (Trump/Cambridge Analytica) might be entirely accurate but he is at least partly a bit of a scumbag
The Meta/Oculus bet was never about VR or gaming. It is to solve Zuck's greatest fear of being beholden to platforms controlled by others. What it was supposed to be was basically what Microsoft missed out on with mobile, losing to Google and Apple. VR and AR could be that next platform to own and control. They would love to have all the data that Google and Apple enjoy. That's what Quest -> Horizon was about, change a gaming device into a mainstream entertainment and work-friendly one. This is all driven out of fear and lack of control. It would suck for them if OpenAI owns the most successful personal AI device.
I still find it funny that Apple did exactly the usual Apple thing of coming in way later and yet inventing a UX for this kind of stuff good enough that Meta immediately started scrambling to copy it.
Having a baked in hardware userbase and dev team helps a lot. The hardest part of inventing new things is getting feedback from real people who really think deeply about this stuff, who also have lots of power within the company to say no.
On the other hand, pico was always copying meta's UI.
And meta's UI has changed every 6 months anyway. Like significantly so. They were up for another redesign anyway :)
They could release a subsidized Facebook phone which is just some android pos with Facebook rammed into it for way less than the 70 billion or whatever they burned on VR.
They actually did that before, if i recall correctly?
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> Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.
It was clearly the wrong bet. He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak. He has to give up on it, although I am sure it will be called a "pivot" into AR glasses.
> He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak.
Literally never met anyone who used or liked the Horizon thing, VRChat in comparison is more popular and doesn't feel like a soulless corporate husk: they also have quite the variety of worlds, from party games, to someone building a whole jet/chopper flight combat simcade world; ofc all of them are a bit jank, but lots of cool stuff and very expressive avatars.
Meta Quest, on the other hand, seems like a really good piece of tech - I still have my Quest 2 (because I'm broke as hell), but I enjoyed even that one, albeit maybe with a slightly more comfy head strap than the default one and the Virtual Desktop app cause their Link app doesn't support Intel Arc GPUs. The tracking is good, the experience of all sorts of stuff in VR is nice, games like H3VR or VTOL VR are great, as is Into The Radius VR! At the same time, I can see why it never saw super widespread adoption - tricky to develop for and also a somewhat limited audience.
Also the productivity situation just isn't there, closest I got to a good productivity setup (out of curiosity) was the Immersed app before they messed it all up by removing support for physical monitors - I could have my 4 physical monitors in VR surrounded by whatever I want and some virtual monitors and just lock in, it was kind of zen despite the technical limitations. It seems like people got promising tech in place... and then never really wrote good software to take advantage of it. Even Virtual Desktop has artificially enforced monitor limits in VR.
I hope VR tech continues to progress (especially lightweight headsets) no matter what happens to Meta.
Yeah, it was a bizarre decision. There isn't a clear ROI on games and that's what Horizon Worlds has been the whole time. There's no equation that says a 100M game automatically makes 100x more than a 1M game on average. If anything the equation is sub-linear. 100B just doesn't seem like the right size for a game investment.
It's supposed to be a Roblox competitor, which does print money, though probably not to the extent of how much they invested.
The problems are 2 fold:
People/kids don't want to put on a VR headset to play Roblox. I guess they're conceding this point by pivoting to mobile.
Meta is the opposite of cool. Real name requirements, only humanoid avatars, super corpo branding, etc really seriously hold them back from competing with VRChat or Roblox. This one is terminal it'll never be fixable as long as Meta is at the helm.
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100B wasn't spent on a game. The RL org is much larger than Horizon Worlds, or even VR
It's not slowly dying, it was dead on arrival and never had any real traction
There are some really good ar glasses for a couple of hundred dollars, I think they are going to end up really cheap and not the 100 billion investment that facebook needs.
Tbf I don't think they ever intended to make back their investments via the goggles. As near as I can tell the thought process was basically: "Real estate + fashion + live entertainment + art + etc is X quadrillion dollars. We could make The Virtual World and capture all that value. It would be irrational not to invest $100B!" Basically Pascal's Investment.
Any you'd recommend or can point me to good reviews for?
Can we all say a big thank you to Neal Stephenson for inspiring Zuckerberg to light tens of billions of dollars on fire in this stupid quest? Imagine what kinds of anticompetitive acquisitions or further privacy-invading tech they might’ve spent that on instead.
I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip. Serving soap cutting videos and giving teen girls body dysmorphia isn't a very compelling mission.
Though I'm sure many are mercenaries and will work for whoever pays the most.
>I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip.
That's the irony. The genius scientists are against AI used for defense, but somehow they're all-in for AI being used to getting people addicted to ads, dopamine, gambling, debt, porn, political manipulation, etc. basically everything that's guarantee to wreck society, but thank god they aren't making weapons I guess.
> I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip
The next 5 years are going to be very disappointing for you.
It makes sense to rebrand anyway, because I'm sure they don't want people to only think of "that social media site" for all of their other ventures. Just like Google rebranding as alphabet
IDK, I still call Google "Google". I even hear employees refer to the entity as "Google". The Meta rebranding seems different.
I think for Google the more meaningful other brands are the actual product ones, like Waymo, Nest, YouTube, Calico, Verily. Those are the ones that benefit from being able to distance themselves a bit from being "a Google company" and all the baggage that comes with that, eg an assumption that it'll be shuttered at some point, will pivot massively into ads, whatever.
I don't think Meta has nearly that need. It's "other companies" are Instagram and Whatsapp, which are basically in the exact same space as Facebook.
I don't think Google really "rebranded" in the same kind of way, since Google is still their brand across the vast majority of their product offerings and the signs on Google offices still say Google. Seems like the Alphabet thing is more about letting the "other bets" be under a higher umbrella, and possibly other reasons related to financial engineering etc.
The rebrand came at a time when "Facebook" was mainly associated with either tremendous scandal (Facebook Files, ad fraud, Cambridge Analytica, Rohingya and Tigray genocides, etc.) or a social media platform increasingly dominated by the elderly.
I think it was a desperate lunge away from that toxic brand toward ANYTHING else. Zuckerberg put his money on VR, given the pandemic and the mild success of Oculus.
Betting big on the metaverse in particular was a mistake, but it might have helped keep the Facebook stink off of products like WhatsApp and Instagram, which remain pretty popular among mainstream audiences.
They had the money to try something, did it, didn't work. Not unheard of. Still a >$1T company.