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Meta Myths

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Re: Meta Myths

#161

Post by contextfree »

throwaheyy wrote: post #118
govg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are arguably "metaverses" by any reasonable standard of the word. They started as video games but have evolved into mediums where people can interact with each other and spend time consuming other content. Especially so in the case of Fortnite with all their concerts and things happening in game, literally the only difference is that one is in VR and the other is in your screen.

It appears you’re redefining the word “metaverse” to mean social media. That’s not the same metaverse that everyone else is talking about, which involves putting on VR goggles and zoning out from the real world. VR and social media are absolutely not the same thing. One takes over your sensory inputs and 100% of your attention. The other you can do on your phone at the same time as other things.

I always thought a metaverse was defined as a virtual 3D world that is composed or federated across multiple apps or servers from different sources (that's what the "meta" part signifies, right?), so the OS-like and/or protocol-like things that structure the composition or federation are the core of a metaverse. So under this definition it doesn't depend on AR or VR, it can just be rendered to 2D displays like regular video games.

Re: Meta Myths

#162

Post by karaterobot »

Interesting. So, why is the stock down to 42% of what it was the last time he said it had a bright future? Stock price isn't everything, to be sure, but: what metric, set of metrics, or other piece of information would Thompson use to evaluate whether Meta's next 5 years is going to be better than its last 5 years?

Re: Meta Myths

#163

Post by squeaky-clean »

karmakaze wrote: post #158
hintymad wrote: post #44

The All-In Podcast had a chart ( https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126 ) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter !

I can't comment on how that 4B/quarter is being spent. However the Quest 2 has been the biggest success in VR to date. Why couldn't some of those billions have been spent on getting a Quest 3 ready for sale for Fall/Xmas 2022? It would be like Apple not releasing new iPhones level of missed opportunity. Or perhaps it's a huge selfish gamble thinking, let's get our product perfected before everyone realizes how big th…

There's the meta quest pro which released last week, but the tech for something in the same price range as the Quest 2 but better probably isn't a thing yet. The Quest 2 did have a $100 price increase 6 months ago.

Re: Meta Myths

#164

Post by paxys »

hintymad wrote: post #160
paxys wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is [Metaverse] going to be a leap in humanity at the scale of the Apollo program?" That is, IMO, the key question behind this entire discussion. Zuck certainly thinks so. I'm sure a lot of people at Meta and outside think so as well. And their detractors obviously don't. There isn't going to be any consensus on whether Meta is spending too much money or not because ultimately it is a referendum on the concept of VR/…

The All-In hosts gave a reasonable comment: Meta may well get a leap in humanity, but it should at least show incremental progress to the investors given such a huge quarterly investment.

In terms of pure technology there has been a crazy amount of incremental progress in the area. We have gone from the first kickstarter for Oculus (when VR was just a sci-fi dream) to the release of Quest Pro and games like Half-Life: Alyx in under a decade.

Of course shareholders really want to count actual monetary returns as progress, and it's the job of the CEO to decide whether prioritizing short term gains is actually in the best interests of the company or not.

Re: Meta Myths

#165

Post by paxys »

hintymad wrote: post #44

The All-In Podcast had a chart ( https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126 ) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter !

I'm not sure how the numbers really compare. If they are showing development costs for a product before it entered the market then it should probably be $2B for Meta, since that's what they paid for Oculus.

Re: Meta Myths

#166

Post by paxys »

miketery wrote: post #57
mjr00 wrote: post #33

Interesting article. People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time. Since the pivot and rename happened a year ago, the metaverse has probably bombed -- and I say probably only because nobody can define exactly what it is, still , beyond people having VR meetings with odd pseudo-Mii avatars -- and the investors convinced that Zuckerberg was…

The metaverse is not bombing. It’s simply not tied to one platform. Between TikTok, Roblox, Minecraft, call of duty (and other triple A multiplayer games), we’re already there. Meta can’t win this one. Same way that no single game publisher can dominate video games. Even the hardware, fine meta becomes the first “Nintendo”. So what? The PlayStations and Xbox’s will come. No one will let Meta have a monopoly.

The defining quality of a hypothetical Metaverse is its immersiveness. The existence of multiplayer games, social media apps and the internet in general does not by itself qualify until it moves beyond flat screens and mouse clicks and successfully incorporates AR/VR/mixed reality and a slew of other emerging tech in the area.

Re: Meta Myths

#167

Post by dom96 »

saltythrowaway wrote: post #26

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I joined to work on meta ads semi-recently. My thinking was that they were under invested in techniques I knew were successful from my time at Google. What I found was a lot of smart people who knew they were under invested and we're capable of closing the gap, but the infrastructure they sat upon was too hard to use to do anything different, and management that rewarded the appearance…

> The result was a lot of config changes making noise in metrics that could be read positively, without implementing the state of the art systems that took a year before you could write a fancy success workplace post about it. That would risk poor performance reviews and the shuffling of reasources away from your team as a result.

Meta has recently switched to a performance review cycle of 1 year (from 6 months). It sounds like one of the reasons this was done was to help make such work more possible.

Re: Meta Myths

#168

Post by throwaheyy »

contextfree wrote: post #161
throwaheyy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears you’re redefining the word “metaverse” to mean social media. That’s not the same metaverse that everyone else is talking about, which involves putting on VR goggles and zoning out from the real world. VR and social media are absolutely not the same thing. One takes over your sensory inputs and 100% of your attention. The other you can do on your phone at the same time as other things.

I always thought a metaverse was defined as a virtual 3D world that is composed or federated across multiple apps or servers from different sources (that's what the "meta" part signifies, right?), so the OS-like and/or protocol-like things that structure the composition or federation are the core of a metaverse. So under this definition it doesn't depend on AR or VR, it can just be rendered to 2D displays like regula…

Sure, but that’s not the metaverse that Meta is trying to sell. They are trying to sell VR specifically.

Re: Meta Myths

#169

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Kye wrote: post #123
hintymad wrote: post #44

The All-In Podcast had a chart ( https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126 ) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter !

What has Tesla changed? All it did was show a market for non-garbage electric cars. Other more established companies are running laps around it now. How much of that $25B went to the ever-retreating promises of self-driving?

Not a Tesla fanboy, but it seems you're dismissing many of Tesla's accomplishments here. Unless @Kye is the username secretly used by Jeff Bezos (hi Jeff!), I'd recommend you weigh how difficult it is to build something similar to Tesla.

Re: Meta Myths

#170

Post by fomine3 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #49

I've really softened on Zuck in the last couple years. The Metaverse stuff looks stupid from the outside, but all else considered, isn't this exactly what we've been asking for out of FAANG for the last ten years? To put all of these insane resources into something that at least could be a cool future to live in? I was the biggest skeptic on earth when they bought Oculus, and assumed it was the death of VR. But they'…

Yeah, I don't like Meta but it's great that they heavily invest their profit to xR/"metaverse". I don't know will finally "metaverse" used well , but it's exciting to see growing.
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