131–140 of 198 posts
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Zuck and Co just completely failed to read the room. Horizons didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready - it failed because nobody actually wanted the product. It didn't solve any problem and added a ton of friction (headsets, eye goggles, no legs, etc). The headsets were uncomfortable and isolating. The vibes were creepy and weird. The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not…
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This one should be studied in management schools. I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet. And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many…
No, Microsoft bailed pretty early. Apple gave it one shot and gave up. The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day. I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the indus…
First one was I think during the releae of the first Oculus, when still hardly anyone got to actually try out VR headsets. An absolutely HUGE area in one of the main halls, the queue going once around the entire area, many hours of waiting time, etc.
Second visit was two years later, in the "indies, hobbyists and everything else hall" - staffers of some Chinese gaming startup were stopping random passersbys and essentially pleading for them to try their VR game - the headset of course being technically superior than the Oculus during the first visit...
As an engineer I love that Zuck likes to throw his money around. He has been one of the big reasons for SWE salary inflation over the past 15 years. We should be thankful that not every company is relentlessly cost cutting
You mean throw those billions, tens of thousands of man hours, shareholder attenton, industry power and mindshare to a mostly useless concept, just because he had the money? Why are those resources not better spent on 100+ startups and 100+ unique ideas that are immediately tested by the market?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This; I mean, they even renamed the company .
They needed to rename the company anyway to get away from bad press. It worked. I think they're quite happy with their current name.
I bought my son a Meta Quest headset and a second one for me to use while playing with him. Honestly, it kind of makes me sick when I use it. Will have to see if it gets any better the next time we play. I'm kind of lazy and just want to lie down when using it, but the last time I tried using it I had to stand up to be able to do whatever it was we were doing.
Apparently you will get used to it over time, I'm still on the getting used to it phase after a couple months. Though I usually only play around with it on weekends. I've noticed sitting and playing a cockpit game is more uncomfortable than standing and playing an fps (with teleport movement).
I think this is one of the reasons VR is niche. You are not going to see mass adoption of a product where you need to get used to physical discomfort in order to properly use it. The use case is not compelling enough to enough people to get over that.
As an engineer I love that Zuck likes to throw his money around. He has been one of the big reasons for SWE salary inflation over the past 15 years. We should be thankful that not every company is relentlessly cost cutting
The company may have been a wonderland for devs a decade ago, but at this point it is right up there with Amazon in terms of terrible work environments, internal politics, PIPs and layoffs.
I bought my son a Meta Quest headset and a second one for me to use while playing with him. Honestly, it kind of makes me sick when I use it. Will have to see if it gets any better the next time we play. I'm kind of lazy and just want to lie down when using it, but the last time I tried using it I had to stand up to be able to do whatever it was we were doing.
Tried some fancy Quest headset more than a decade later, and same thing.
It's crazy that after spending like $100 billion in the space they still haven't been able to remove the most fundamental barriers to entry.
Genuine question - was it the product or the implementation that led this to not pan out? Maybe both?