My jaded opinion is that Musk may not really care about remote work, but it turns out return-to-office requirements are a useful way to get people to leave without having to fire or lay them off, and bypass stuff like the WARN act.
> “Day zero. Sharpen your blades boys," Calacanis texted Musk. "2 day a week Office requirement = 20% voluntary departures.”
I think it's both -- I do think he's against remote work (remember his remarks at Tesla "pretend to work somewhere else": https://www.forbes.com/sites/annakaplan/2022/06/01/musk-says...) but also it's a great way to cheaply get rid of a lot of employees who were told they could WFH forever.
To save money at the time he drove a van for a carpool service (he could use it for free as a result). A lot of the guys on his van were in tech.
When the first rounds of layoffs hit, guys would get on at the end of the day and they would talk about their severance. The first question in response to “I got laid off” was “What’s your severance?”
At one point deep into 2002, he remembered a change. Now guys were getting on the van with all their stuff in a box. He played the game, even though he wasn’t in tech, and asked one of the guys with a box, “What’s your severance?”
Adopt an open standard, add proprietary bits so that content worked best (or exclusively) on their own version, and force other players and competitors out.
yeah, i'm curious about this too. i've spoken to many high level folks in MSR (microsoft research) and they're all massive proponents of open-source software and unix and are as excited as i am about being able to open a 'native-ish' *nix terminal and do work.
in fact, i've got my win10 box set up for dev, and it's nearly identical to my mac! it wasn't 100% straightforward, and to get windowed emacs working from the cli took a little twiddling, but overall in less than a few hours i had everything running flawlessly. :)
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.
> What I think makes ATT a tempting scapegoat is that it creates a great story. Apple enacted a change in the name of privacy and that change has adversely affected both Facebook and small businesses that relied on Facebook. That’s a dramatic, captivating storyline, with two rivals, both corporate behemoths, on opposing sides.
(The footnote on this blog is a great explanation as to why FB's adTech was considered so bananas and why its no longer as much.)
It's a good counterpoint to the equally throw away argument that "if you disagreed with x you should have shorted it".
The problem with shorting is you can't just be right about the eventual direction... You have to be pretty bang on with the timing as well.
Therefore it's absolutely possible for people to suspect or have strong belief that something is unsustainable without having the liquidity or confidence on timing to take action on it.
No it's not to say there aren't Perma bears and other I told you so people crawling out of the woodwork, but that doesn't mean that every person who didn't capitalize on this is Monday-morning quarterbacking.
The interesting question to be answered now is if "web3" skills are an effective substitute good (in the pure economic sense) for employers looking for developers.
I suspect a lot of pure web3 devs won't actually make a more competitive market beyond incentivizing yet another fizzbuzz-like hoop in the interviewing process to weed out people who learned about blockchain tech and otherwise can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.
On second thought... I should acknowledge my elitism in that last sentence and maybe be more cautious. Good grief, I got my last 4 years of professional experience working on IoT, which I bet was looked down upon in a similar manner by others when it started.
Maybe the takeaway is that we should all to the best of our abilities keep at least a casual hand in the water of tech so we have a general idea of the current.
> Earlier, I said that 'Widevine-in-Chrome-on-Linux-on-aarch64' is not an officially supported platform.
> I lied.
> Chromebooks exist, many have aarch64 CPUs, they run Chrome on Linux (more or less), and they officially support Widevine.
The whole post is worth a read. Its pretty sort and well written!