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A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

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Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#81

Post by dnissley »

bink wrote: post #30
neel8986 wrote: post #12

Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sa…

Their focus on making Facebook for mobile platforms was smart, their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard. By critical acquisitions I assume you mean Instagram and WhatsApp. Both were anti-competitive attempts to stave off becoming the next MySpace (but also successful). Everything else on the list of acquisitions looks like gambles that did not pay off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_merge…

> their efforts to make a mobile phone were late and substandard

Meta was in its infancy when the mobile hardware revolution was happening. Do you really think they stood a chance of creating their own hardware platform while simultaneously adapting their existing software platform to the new paradigm? According to a google search they had 850 employees in 2008. Apple had 32000.

> It's not that they are speculating on a moonshot, it's that they are wasting so much of their money on a single moonshot

And yet Google is constantly trounced on this very site for never committing and constantly shutting down promising products. Armchair critics will never be satisfied and Zuck is wise to ignore them.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#82

Post by b112 »

irrational wrote: post #66
monero-xmr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have friends that got married, never had kids, and spend large chunks of their free time in MMORPGs, League of Legends, and a seemingly endless array of virtual-based entertainment. They also seem to get a lot of personal meaning and satisfaction from nerd pop culture like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings which is evidence that their rich fantasy lives have such deep meaning for them. So I find it totally plausi…

> So I find it totally plausible that a huge amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world I, on the other hand, know nobody that uses virtual worlds. I find it plausible that a tiny amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world. I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.

I find it completely implausible that a huge amount of people would.

But people already do.

Email, Facebook, twitter, messaging, slack, all of it, is by no means real, human interaction. It is a step away from that.

Some even say that this type of interaction is so fake, so filled with disinformation, and algorithmic monkeying, that it is toxic poison.

Yet people will be with friends at a restaurant, or hanging out, and so addicted, so unable to stop, that they are constantly be staring at their screen instead of interacting in person!

People cannot help themselves, and people cannot resist addictive platforms.

So sadly, Zuck probably has a good idea. He's probably a bit early, but you can be sure when VR takes a Musk implant, and a simple pair of glasses for full immersion, people will be in VR while having lunch with you.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#83

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #39
neel8986 wrote: post #12

Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sa…

His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning Wha? This is revisionist history. Facebook was very late to having a mobile app. It was widely ridiculed for a very long time for not having an iPhone app, and when it did finally get one, it was so bad that it was practically unusable for at least two years. I remember a number of friends and family members giving up on Facebook because its app was so slow, ba…

[deleted]

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#84

Post by Wowfunhappy »

timbit42 wrote: post #60
fallat wrote: post #46

Too much focus on VR. Apple's execution on AR will determine a lot.

VR will be huge for gaming and other more niche things, but AR will be what people use all day, every day in their lives. Meta is focused too much on VR when they are not a gaming company. They should be focused on AR. They will be playing catch up with Apple when Apple released their AR.

The applications of AR are obvious, but I don't think the technology to make it generally useful exists. You need a device which:

---

1. Looks normal, or at least relatively normal. (I'm not actually convinced the "at least" part is sufficient.)

2. Is comfortable to wear for extended periods. (Not too heavy, not too much heat, etc.)

3. Has a battery which can last most of the day.

4. Has lenses which are transparent, but onto which images can be digitally superimposed.

5. Has enough computing power on-board to do the actual AR calculations and graphics rendering, or is able to wirelessly communicate with a phone with extremely low latency. (Note that for Meta specifically, the latter approach would still leave them reliant on Apple/Google.)

* Bonus points for handling prescription lenses somehow, lest you cut off a huge portion of the potential market!

---

This is really hard! Modern computers are small, but they aren't nearly small enough to do #5 without ruining #1, much less #2. Nor are they power-efficient enough for #3.

It's great to want things, but outside of science fiction you need more than just a vision of how something could work, you need technology to make it happen.

Building a useful VR headset is not easy, but it is a lot easier. You don't need the battery to last all day (if you have any battery at all), and it's okay if the headset looks kind of stupid. You want the headset to be as comfortable as possible, but it's okay if it feels weighty after an hour or so. And because the headset can be bigger and heavier, you can also get away with shoving more computing power inside.

We'll see what Apple announces at WWDC, but I'm skeptical they will make more headway than Meta.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#85

Post by tsimionescu »

kingcharles wrote: post #27
tsimionescu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any kind of indication VR (or its cousin, AR) is important to any extent? Everything I know suggests it's a niche technology that has little chance of becoming anything but a niche technology. It's not made any significant headway in gaming, in entertainment of other kinds, nor in general business settings. There are some specialist domains where 3D visualization is worth the cost and inconvenience, but it s…

It will eventually become one of the most significant technologies in history, alongside AI, in my opinion. People are confusing bulky headsets with the general concept of VR. If I showed you a working holodeck today you would think it significant. Mark made the right choice to go balls deep on VR when he did. I don't think he should dial back. When going through hell, keep going.

> If I showed you a working holodeck today you would think it significant.

Would I? How would an empty small room with cool audio-visual-only illusions help me more than a computer and phone do today?

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#86

Post by grumple »

vallsurf wrote: post #52
bastardoperator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want to forget about the other 3 co-founders that were basically robbed by Zuckerberg then sure, he built it all by himself.

Sure, if you're talking about a pre-seed stage startup with a single product 20 years ago. Meta/Facebook isn't that anymore, and hasn't been that for a very long time. Say what you want about Zuck, but the fact he more or less successfully has been running one the worlds largest tech companies of the century is pretty impressive.

What other products do they have other than those they acquired? 98% of their revenue is from advertising on Facebook and Instagram (according to their financial reports).

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#87

Post by bmitc »

neel8986 wrote: post #12

Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sa…

> Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.

How many decades and hardware cycles does it take for this prediction to go away? Billions has been poured into VR and it's still as much a novelty and fad as ever.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#88

Post by lukasbarton »

timbit42 wrote: post #60
fallat wrote: post #46

Too much focus on VR. Apple's execution on AR will determine a lot.

VR will be huge for gaming and other more niche things, but AR will be what people use all day, every day in their lives. Meta is focused too much on VR when they are not a gaming company. They should be focused on AR. They will be playing catch up with Apple when Apple released their AR.

"About half" of Reality Labs spend is in AR R&D according to Bosworth. I'll be very interested to see what Apple brings to the table, but would not expect Meta to be playing catch up.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#90

Post by tsimionescu »

quantumwoke wrote: post #24
tsimionescu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any kind of indication VR (or its cousin, AR) is important to any extent? Everything I know suggests it's a niche technology that has little chance of becoming anything but a niche technology. It's not made any significant headway in gaming, in entertainment of other kinds, nor in general business settings. There are some specialist domains where 3D visualization is worth the cost and inconvenience, but it s…

For a brief moment during 2020, you could see the hype actually meet reality when a wave of VR startups that promised to transport us "as if we were really there" to the office. Now, you can choose to be cynical about that but I think it genuinely did live up to the hype when I could remote in to a full infinite-screen workstation and interact much more freely with coworkers than a Zoom call. These days, I see it muc…

> Now, you can choose to be cynical about that but I think it genuinely did live up to the hype when I could remote in to a full infinite-screen workstation and interact much more freely with coworkers than a Zoom call.

How exactly did you interact more freely with co-workers? I fully agree that in-person meetings are more productive than Zoom calls, but true telepresence that would capture that requires far more than I've seen any VR setup come even close to provide. Especially since everyone is busy with the display, while the camera+microphone part is actually miles away.

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