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?
Having an engineering mindset is not the same as never making mistakes (or never being too early to the market). The only way you won’t make those mistakes and keep a perfect record is if you never do anything major or step out of the comfort zone.
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.
His engineering mindset made him blind to the fact the metaverse was a product that nobody wanted or needed. In one of the Fridman interviews, he goes on and on about all the cool technical challenges involved in making the metaverse work. But when Fridman asked him what he likes to do in his spare time, it was all things that you could precisely not do in the metaverse. It was baffling to me that he failed to connect the dots.
VRChat is more popular, but it doesn’t mean that copying their approaches would be the move.
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).
Yes, I thought the same exact thing. Seemed so odd to hear him gush over his foiling and MMA while simultaneously expecting everyone else to migrate to the metaverse.
I mean, I am not sure what response people expected when a person, in a conversation about their work project, is being asked “what do you like to do in your free time.”
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.
This is a super common behavior when a) the product is for other people, but b) you don't care about those other people. You'll see both in technologists (who, as you say, get fascinated by the technology or the idea) and in MBAs (who instead get hypnotized by fashionable trends, empire building, and the potential for large piles of money).
The computer game and television/movie industries both dwarf adult entertainment. The reasons for the rationale on how pornography made the VCR and VHS in particular a success (bringing affordable video pornography into the privacy of your home) do not apply to VR.
and is responsible for building evil products to fund this stuff.
Apple photos and FaceTime are good products for sharing information without ruining your attention span or bring evil. Facebook could’ve been like that.
If you actually listen to how Zuck defines the metaverse, it's not Horizons or even a VR headset. That's what pundits say, most of whom love pointing out big failures more than they like thinking deeply.
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.
It’s really obvious the actual “metaverse” goal wasn’t a vrchat/second life style product. It was another layer on top of the real world where physical space could be monetized, augmented and eventually advertised upon.
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.
It's a bit too early IMHO to declare the metaverse a failure.
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.
The Quest is the top selling VR headset by a very large margin.
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.
Nor could I. And I can't imagine sitting next to my wife watching a football game together on my phone. But I could while waiting in line by myself.
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.
Asking for an impossible hypothetical and then claiming something equally impossible. stay classy hackernews.
Chances are that you would take the 8 million and run.
Having a nerdy vision of the future and spending tens of billions of dollars to try and make it a reality while shareholders and bean counters crucify you for it is the most engineer thing imaginable. What other CEO out there is taking such risks?
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.
Think of it as a 50B spending spree where he gave that to VR tech out of enthusiasm. Even I, with the cold dark heart that I have, has to admit he's a geek hero with his open source attitude.
That's the point. He does things because he is excited about something, not to please shareholders. Shareholders didn't liked Metaverse at all. And shareholders likely don't like spending billion dollar in GPUs just to give the benefit away for free to others.
Zuck's job is to have vision and take risks. He's doing that. He's going to encounter failures and I doubt he's still looking in the rearview mirror about it. And overall, Zuck has a tremendous amount of net success, to say the least.
It isn't necessarily a failure "yet". Don't think anybody is saying VR/AR isn't a huge future product, just that current tech is not quite there. We'll see if Apple can do better, they both made tradeoffs.
It is still possible that VR and Generative AI can join in some synergy.
I get so annoyed by this every time I see it. It’s not because AI took over the news cycle that the idea of a Metaverse is a failure.
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.
That's almost the point isn't it? He still believes in it, just the media moved on. Passion means having a vision that isn't deterred by immediate short term challenges because you can "see over the mountain".
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.
Unsuccessful ideas can live on for a long time in a large corporation.
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.
I swear, this feels like people get paid to write positive stuff about him? Have you forgotten his shitty leadership and practices around data and lock-ins?
Yes how dare different people have different opinions about different people? It's almost as if we all should be a monolithic voice that agrees with you.
The thread was suspiciously positive, like almost exclusive. Your comment adds nothing to the discussion, you're just snarky and nothing else. So get off my back
>>I swear, this feels like people get paid to write positive stuff about him?
----
>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!"
