And then expecting the guillotine as “justice”, it’s a downward spiral. But this is just business. Leaders make miscalculations all the time. In this case, Zuck’s business problem is replacing the growth story of a maturing product that is the Facebook app and really making social media an entire industry.
Meta and VR is a potential new industry. The only thing that will replace the SM growth is creating/owning an industry again. He liked the VR world because he could own it for a while. It would be more difficult to disrupt than what keeps happening with SM. TikTok is the latest rival but there have been many. And there’s now as ad revenue pressures. It’s a recipe for a massive layoff. Since it’s a business, that is the most appropriate action. I don’t think anyone expected how difficult and expensive it would be. I assume the layoffs will slow this down further and it’s effectively a loss or a solution without a problem.
> I don’t think anyone expected how difficult and expensive it would be
I agree with the rest of your post, but this might be more of an "anyone inside of Meta" scenario. There's plenty of skeptics around short-term VR (myself included). Getting a non-technical audience into it is going to require a set of massive technological innovations, imho, both in software and hardware.
Even then, having your vision be completely blocked to the outside world is not something casual users are going to enjoy for any extended amount of time or frequency.
If I'm writing a post and my kid or dog or friend needs my attention, I can set the phone down for a second. If I'm in VR, the best I can hope for is a button that makes the screen transparent so that my eyes can see (and be seen!) again short of reaching up to my face, taking my head gear off, then putting it back on. Even then, the immersion is completely broken.
