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Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

johncoogan.com

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Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#81

Post by dkarl »

I guess Zuckerberg is convinced that VR is the next breakthrough that has the potential to displace Facebook. I wonder if this is a good way to deal with that threat, though? Even with this level of investment, if there's a VR breakthrough based on fundamentally novel ideas, it will probably come from somewhere else, and Facebook will be bogged down by their existing entrenched players attached to ideas that went nowhere. It might be smarter to keep investment minimal, or only invest in hardware, until you identify the conceptual breakthrough and can follow it up quickly.

Assuming Zuckerberg is smarter enough to think of this, maybe he believes that the breakthrough in VR won't be a conceptual one, but will be the result of a massive investment of effort towards presenting existing data for VR consumption. This is essentially what the posted article suggests. Or maybe he thinks he can force his existing VR workforce down the right path when it appears, and that's less naive of an idea than it appears to me.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#82

Post by SavantIdiot »

krm01 wrote: post #66
SavantIdiot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision. Google set out to catalog the entire internet on day one. If that's not a grand vision that they spent billions on, what is? AirBNB set out to disrupt the entire vacation rental market. Stripe set out to disrupt the entire POS payment market. Apple is the only one who fits your narrative: they set out to ma…

Might be good to take a closer look at history. #GOOGLE Google started as a research project called BackRub. It only turned into Google and a mission after it started taking too much bandwidth on Stanford's servers Source: https://inshorts.com/en/news/google-began-as-a-research-proj... #AIRBNB Airbnb began just so that the founders could make some extra money to pay rent. Not to disrupt an industry. Source: https://w…

# GOOGLE

"calling it a "web crawler" designed to roam the web. "

I'm right.

# STRIPE "At the time Patrick was working on several side projects and they debated why it was so difficult to accept payments on the web. They sought to solve the problem and see if it was possible to make it simple - really simple. "

I'm right.

# AIRBNB

I'm wrong.

The first two set out to do something huge.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#83

Post by fullshark »

Basically this piece reaches the same conclusion as Zuckerberg in 2018. As Zuckerberg said "The Metaverse is ours to lose." If you think VR + computers are going to get to the place where the metaverse becomes preferred internet interface for users for a multitude of use cases, then it's as simple as that.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#84

Post by meltedcapacitor »

salmonfamine wrote: post #46
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could cut costs and just try to be good at being a better Facebook. I know that is heresy in the stock world.

I think they effectively cannot. There would be a shareholder's revolt.

How do they revolt? Facebook shareholders cannot remove the Zuck and he doesn't need their money. They have zero power.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#85

Post by Arathorn »

The elephant in the corner of the room for the Metaverse seems to be that relatively few problem domains actually benefit from a 3D spatial UI. Our retinas are 2D; our brains think in 2.5D at best: and unless we're chasing each other around a virtual landscape in an MMORPG or we're manipulating 3D geometry, it's not clear that 3D does anything but get in the way.

You could even argue that the Metaverse effectively exists already today, in the form of multi-user domain-specific collaborative apps such as Figma, Etherpad, Google Docs etc - if only there was a way to liberate the data from the presentation layer. One could then do a fancy multiplayer 3D window manager in VR to blend it all together, but this feels like eyecandy rather than a fundamental improvement.

That said, there's no question (in my mind) that we need a common real-time data layer to share the data securely between the different apps and experiences who build on it, and it'd be cute if the spatial stuff did exist in the same coordinate space somehow for ease of interoperability. If nothing else, 3D spatial file managers would be fun (bring back FSN!). If anyone is interested in such a thing, we're actively looking for folks to help build out genuinely open metaverse stuff on Matrix (https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1453869116847239175).

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#86

Post by randyrand »

henning wrote: post #29

> There will be no cap on concurrent users. This is one of the hardest problems to solve from a technical point of view, but it’s critical. The biggest online games still restrict each session to around 100 players. Even though millions might be playing at a given time worldwide, a single server will be capped. Massive concurrency will make metaverse experiences feel very different from the present-day internet. Oh c…

limiting the range / scope of your affects is probably the best answer here. keep a small ‘n’

FPS players only affect a single ballistic trajectory (a bullet) at a time.

Characters also need to be rendered, but that’s O(N).

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#87

Post by crearo »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #47
krm01 wrote: post #9

As I was watching their 'keynote' I couldn't help but wonder about the many companies that took a similar approach and then died. Spending a ton of money on something doesn't make it automatically successful. [1] In fact, history has shown the opposite to be true. Take Facebook itself for example, it succeeded, not because it poured Billions into building its social network. Mark built something small, for a small ma…

> Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision. Google set out to catalog the entire internet on day one. If that's not a grand vision that they spent billions on, what is? AirBNB set out to disrupt the entire vacation rental market. Stripe set out to disrupt the entire POS payment market. Apple is the only one who fits your narrative: they set out to ma…

The OP probably means once a company is already established and has their core product peaked at max profit, they struggle to innovate further and build new products. Working at FAANG; I can see the desperation my org has in trying to build the next generation to remain relevant.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#88

Post by adriand »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #10

Gross. If anything, the more I have become ensconced in the internet the more I have begun to appreciate the physical world. My mental health must be wired to require actual trees, sunshine, birds, walks in the neighborhood.... Like a library, I want my internet to be there when I want it, but I don't want to live in it.

> My mental health must be wired to require actual trees, sunshine, birds, walks in the neighborhood

It's not just your mental health, this is a well-researched fact of human/animal nature.

What if the next great revolution in mobile/internet/etc. technology is for it to become less important in our lives? For it to recede into the background while we prioritize human relationships, the outdoors, being present?

That might sound crazy but the alternative is actually making us crazy.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#89

Post by dgb23 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #10

Gross. If anything, the more I have become ensconced in the internet the more I have begun to appreciate the physical world. My mental health must be wired to require actual trees, sunshine, birds, walks in the neighborhood.... Like a library, I want my internet to be there when I want it, but I don't want to live in it.

My younger self would love that stuff though, so he can escape reality and distract myself. Most video games and social platforms give us a kind of low-effort stimulation that nudges us into a toxic lifestyle.

I think a lot of mistakes will happen for many people until we learn to build and use these kind of things responsibly/sustainably.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#90

Post by littlestymaar »

mrits wrote: post #70
bduerst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is not betting billions with hololens on it's core windows desktop userbase.

Maybe Facebook needs to find a company like Skype to buy for $8.5B

They did so with Instagram and Whatsapp and those are arguably their most successful product today.
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