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Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

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Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#161

Post by yallpendantools »

atrus wrote: post #89

Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision. Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990. Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to crea…

I think you make a good point but also, honestly, VR seemed so beyond Facebook's depth. Zuck, IMO, was reaching for a pie on a table at the other end of the room. I understand the whole point of acquiring Oculus was to get allies on that table at the other end but---excuse my corpo-speak here---I don't think Oculus ever had synergy with the rest of Facebook's business.

This is just my 2c as an outside observer, software engineer ofc. I'm sure some MBA could make a case for said synergy. But it made sense to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks. But Oculus?!?!?! IMO Facebook had a better chance opening a cloud computing division.

So, achieving the Metaverse dream with the money Zuck has spent was always gonna be a tall order at this point but if anyone could've made it work, it wasn't gonna be a social media company.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#162

Post by tavavex »

actualwitch wrote: post #132
tavavex wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While simultaneously renaming the VR headsets to also use Meta branding instead of Oculus, even though Oculus was a great brand and the most recognizable name in the VR industry. What made it worse is that by that point they'd produced lots of headsets with Oculus branding, including an Oculus button on one of the controllers. So, they had to change that button to also have a different logo and name, and have the sof…

IIRC the reason they abandoned Oculus brand was that Palmer Luckey sold the company with condition the Oculus headsets would not need a facebook account to use it. Later they renamed the company and headset, and would you look at that — it requires meta account now.

I think the Oculus Quest 2 was the first one to release with a Facebook requirement, but it was still Oculus-branded. It was this headset that they swapped out the branding on when they renamed themselves to Meta. Earlier models still have the Oculus logo on them and the controllers, despite being as locked-down as all the others. The rebrand came much later than the account requirement.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#163

Post by giantrobot »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #47
xd1936 wrote: post #4

Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?

They also renamed the entire corporation from "Facebook" to "Meta" to prove how serious they were about it.

They changed the name of the company to distance themselves from a number of scandals including Cambridge Analytica, COVID vaccine misinformation, and sitting on studies about teen mental health and social media use.[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59083601

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#164

Post by alex1138 »

Traster wrote: post #90
tyleo wrote: post #2

Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for. They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.

I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing mo…

They already attacked it with everything they've got lmao

As in, in 2012. They outright replaced people's email addresses in their profile (makes it harder to reach people outside the walled garden, makes it harder to transfer your credentials to a competing service) and I've heard Google+ links got blocked

Zuckerberg is many things, not everything he's accused of (Trump/Cambridge Analytica) might be entirely accurate but he is at least partly a bit of a scumbag

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#165

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Traster wrote: post #90
tyleo wrote: post #2

Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for. They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.

I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing mo…

Spending tens of billions on something that was never going to work is certainly meta.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#166

Post by sghiassy »

atrus wrote: post #89

Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision. Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990. Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to crea…

Remember, even Apple had the Apple Newton

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#167

Post by alex1138 »

yallpendantools wrote: post #161
atrus wrote: post #89

Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision. Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990. Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to crea…

I think you make a good point but also, honestly, VR seemed so beyond Facebook's depth. Zuck, IMO, was reaching for a pie on a table at the other end of the room. I understand the whole point of acquiring Oculus was to get allies on that table at the other end but---excuse my corpo-speak here---I don't think Oculus ever had synergy with the rest of Facebook's business. This is just my 2c as an outside observer, softw…

> because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks

Another point of view: antitrust. What Zuck did with Whatsapp at a minimum ought to be highly illegal. He's a black hat hacker from his history and WA is more of the same. Brian Acton said "it's time, delete Facebook". That's not mutual benefit, that's conquering

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#168

Post by asdff »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #47
xd1936 wrote: post #4

Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?

They also renamed the entire corporation from "Facebook" to "Meta" to prove how serious they were about it.

Thank god Mark Zuckerberg is not self aware in the least bit because we can keep getting hilarious gems like this for probably the rest of his days. The guy probably lives as close to the Truman Show experience as one can realistically get.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#169

Post by asdff »

atrus wrote: post #89

Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision. Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990. Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to crea…

VR seems cool but imo just sucks as a product no matter how it has been used. Like who is the market for? Gamers? They might be trying to play for the next 12 hours straight. They don't want to waive their arms around and turn their head.

Nongamers? And you are going to somehow get nongamers to shell out for the required hardware for this casual half interest pursuit of theirs? Doesn't work.

I feel like zuck has been billionaire for too long to probably understand this.

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