Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every community needs a villain, but ask yourself this: whatever happened to Libra? Portal? (Or Building 8 in general.) Did you know that Facebook built its own drone (Aquila) that it abandoned in 2018? M? Facebook Home? Parse? Wirehog? As seen with Google, just having excellent engineers and revenue are insufficient to building lasting products, much less fulfilling an aggressive long-term mission.
>whatever happened to Libra? Portal? (Or Building 8 in general.) Did you know that Facebook built its own drone (Aquila) that was abandoned in 2018? M? Parse? Wirehog? Agree with your point - to a limit. Some of facebook experiements flopped but not all. Also, unlike Google, fb mostly marketed them as experiements. Replying mostly for sharing purposes since not all of these products' histories are common knowledge. N…
Fair enough. Though I'd argue that with these big internet companies, the line between actual product and perpetually in beta experiment is blurred, more often by Google than others.
> IMO it was good tech no one trusted (understandably).
And as a consequence, the adoption of Portal seems pretty negligible.
> I think it was a huge missed opportunity for fb to enter the data center race against aws/gcs/azure. If fb built a benign cash cow, maybe they'd taper down their scummy social network ambitions. Or at least the value extraction. AWS cash seems to fund cool amzn loss leaders (alexa, etc). I think the same thing applies to wit.ai and other AI products they buy - if they could commercialize them into an "AWS for AI" product suite maybe they'd find a new profit center.
Very intriguing point that provides useful thought for both a what-if (Facebook didn't kill Parse) and potential future opportunities- if only Facebook cared for them.
> Makes sense that a startup business (Yeah, I just threw it in to get a full category range and historical range of different products killed by Facebook. I also edited in Facebook Home as well to touch upon smartphone software.
My main point is that it's all well and good for a corporate behemoth like FB to make the claim that they're getting into a new speculative field, but it's natural to be skeptical given how many of their experiments or (attempts at) products don't stick around. So as exciting as this sounds like, I give it as much credence as, say, IBM saying that Watson is going to revolutionize and transform healthcare through artificial intelligence.
It also goes in line with my cousin comment in another subthread about how Facebook's history is littered with retired replications of existing products. I didn't even mention Facebook cloud gaming (Facebook Gaming - admittedly still in progress), video streaming (Facebook Live), Clubhouse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580014), even HQ Trivia (Confetti). So that makes one wonder- does Zuckerberg really care about the metaverse idea, or is he just getting into it because Apple supposedly is?