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Facebook Renames to Meta

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Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#721

Post by txsoftwaredev »

eli wrote: post #274
joshenberg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I wonder. Early VR adopters/technologists hate what happened to Oculus and there aren't a lot of newcomers to that market. I don't think cheaper headsets are going to fix that in the near future so I don't know whom they're targeting. Seems risky to lean into something where the experts already think you screwed up.

Oculus sold 2 of every 3 VR headsets last quarter. If there's a lesson here, it's that you can't extrapolate mass market appeal from what early adopters think.

I wonder how many are still actively being used. I bought the Oculus quest early on. Spent a bunch on different games, hooked it up and played PC VR games. Used it nearly daily for a few months but have since given it away. Partly due to the current limitations of VR tech (it's heavy, screen resolution is still very low, need a large space to really play it) as well as now having to use a Facebook account.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#723

Post by rvz »

wpietri wrote: post #536
filoleg wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that’s the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc. Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whats…

They were great acquisitions because Facebook failed to compete in those markets. Facebook continues to fail to compete in the youth market. I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen. And they're still failing to innovate. Facebook now will be "retooling" toward "serving young adults the north star, rather than optimizing for older people." https://twitt…

> I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen.

I guess Apple failed to compete and innovate when they acquired NeXT and Beats. Or Microsoft failed to innovate as soon as they acquired GitHub and Xamarin. /s

Very senseless acquisitions that have no long term strategy or reason behind it to sustain the future of the business or to compete in the market. /s

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#724

Post by d--b »

In all seriousness, this looks like an Hooli ad from the Silicon Valley TV show. I can really picture Mark Zuckerberg as a real life Gavin Belson surrounded by minions telling him all day long how great this Meta thing is.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#725

Post by alasdair_ »

carbonguy wrote: post #304
daviding wrote: post #36

If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…

> If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter. > Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? I mean, that would be nice f…

>b) How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?

$300 * 3 billion people, so $900 Billion give or take which coincidentally is right around the market cap of the entire company.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#726

Post by int_19h »

JohnFen wrote: post #467
neuronexmachina wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which coined the term "metaverse."

I genuinely wonder why Facebook thinks that using that term is a smart thing, considering that Snow Crash is a pretty heavily dystopian novel where everything is owned and run by corrupt, powerful, and abusive corporations. It really seems like they're tipping their hand here.

Snow Crash is literally the first thing that came to my mind when I saw FB talking about "metaverse".

And not only it is a dystopia, but the Big Bad in the story is literally the guy who owns the physical metaverse infrastructure:

> “I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse — the entire Street — exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.

He's also pretty open about his methods:

> “Yeah, you know, a monopolist’s work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.” ... “Y’know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted up Ma Bell?” “Just barely.” The reporter is a woman in her twenties. “You know what it was, right?” “Voice communications monopoly.” “Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business. Moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, one at a time. Government busted them up—at the same time when I was starting cable TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It’s like if they figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the airplane were being introduced.”

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#727

Post by danShumway »

The core idea of having a universal layer on top of reality that is owned by any company, at all, is utterly repulsive to me. I'm not sure I have the words to describe it.

The type of world Facebook is describing is always -- 100% of the time -- a dystopia if it is a privatized, corporate-controlled AR/VR layer where ordinary people need permission and contracts to interact with each-other. Anything any single company or coordinated group of FAANG companies make will be awful when scaled up to the level Mark is talking about. There's no promise they can make to me, there's no strategy they can pursue to ease my worries. Purely by virtue of a single company (or a group of FAANG companies) being in charge of it, it's already garbage.

Having said that, of all of the companies to try and assert control over a "metaverse", Facebook is probably amongst the least suited and most dangerous companies to do so. If they can't even run the Oculus platform competently, how can they possibly claim they're competent enough to run a giant industry-wide platform on top of Oculus?

----

> The metaverse will be a collective project that goes beyond a single company. It will be created by people all over the world, and open to everyone.

And this stuff is just complete nonsense. No platform that Facebook has ever been involved with has ever even remotely come close to being "collective" or "open" to everyone worldwide, and it's just wildly insulting to pretend that anything about that is going to change now.

Facebook can't even launch this announcement article without making a bunch of XHR requests and falling over if Javascript isn't enabled. So sure, let's all close our eyes and pretend that they're magically capable of building an accessible, open VR platform that respects user privacy/agency. What has Facebook ever done in its entire history as a company that would make us believe that they are in any way trustworthy or qualified enough to try and build a consumer platform/medium of this scale?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#728

Post by alasdair_ »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #686
AlexandrB wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially dubious in Facebook's case because Mark Zuckerberg controls the majority of voting shares. If he wanted to run the company straight into the ground I doubt anyone could stop him.

Mark Zuckerberg could not make his salary $800 billion, or donate the entire company to charity. That’s what that means, nothing about business decisions

>Mark Zuckerberg could not make his salary $800 billion

This would be an interesting test case. The limits on what he can or cannot do are remarkably ill-defined.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#729

Post by lnanek2 »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #455
daviding wrote: post #36

If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…

If what they're doing now is any indication, I don't think they'll succeed with it anyway. They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30. Their existing prototypes are outrageously embarrassing. I'm the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, awkward, and embarrassing…

Are you sure you aren't living in a techie bubble? Oculus consistently tops the best selling headsets list at amazon cnet, PCMag, etc.. The only non-developers I know with headsets all have Oculus or more rarely PSVR. Maybe they aren't cutting edge, but everyday people can't afford cutting edge anyway.

They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the public at large has no knowledge of that. All the public knows is that it's decent hardware for a super low price compared to the competitors, it doesn't require a PC, and it's what most of their friends with a headset are using.

Can't really call having the most popular headset not succeeding, even if it is probably subsidized with their massive ads money making machine.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#730

Post by T-A »

koonsolo wrote: post #453
filoleg wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that’s the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc. Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whats…

I agree that Facebook and Zuch can't be that stupid. But for me, I can't see this working. There is no VR game that really killed it. I also don't see which generation would actually be into this. So it's not a "idiots!", but more of a "what am I missing here?". Will be interesting to see this play out

> I also don't see which generation would actually be into this.

Roblox has more than 200 million daily active users; 67% of them are under 16 [1]. Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling?

[1] https://backlinko.com/roblox-users

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