Can't we just accept Mark wasn't the visionary mostly but the lucky guy? They all had some degree of luck but Mark seems to have had not much visionary insights since the start. Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos even Ellison and McNealy all pushed or push visions: I cannot find anything when looking at Zuckerberg, from basically day one: there seems no greater vision and this article seems perfectly in line with that. Maybe I don't get it?

While he seems to have way less visionary ideas than the rest of the technorati (eg. no space company), he seemed to have one vision... building a "platform". (but IMO VR is a "visionary" vision... and admittedly a personal favorite of mine).

It was reported that Zuck was obsessed with the idea of building a "platform". As a young software developer, he was infatuated with the idea of others building off of what he (and co) created. Many of FB decisions were based on this vision (and the rest are reportedly SS decisions).

The pinnacle example of this was the original friend graph+api was fb trying to be a platform for games and social content (ended by Cambridge Analytica scandal and firmly killed by GDPR data sharing regulations).

Why else would FB host a developer conference? Because Zuck wanted to be like those other tech companies that build tech for tech people.

Oculus seems to be the next platform bet - its cool new tech without a strong leading company yet so there's room to own it - and it directly has a store and SDK so easy "platform" touch points. It seems that pumping up the metaverse is the roadmap to getting FB/Oculus as the integration point for AR/VR tech.

> Oculus seems to be the next platform bet - its cool new tech without a strong leading company yet so there's room to own it -

Yes and that is exciting but I do not see another plan than more invasive ads? If there is a real plan that brings us further I would be applauding that. But is there? Facebook has enough money to push it but the plans seem, well, banal. And by now almost illegal in the EU.

> I do not see another plan than more invasive ads

I think right now making the tech affordable (through subsidy/ads/whatever) to get it in the hands of people and get the creative ideas flowing is great.

That said, I agree and i'm sick of ads. My smart TV has ads, Apple is integrating ads and now even my f*king electric toothbrush tried to send me ads so i can't wait for this trend to die.

I personally think that VR/AR is cool and will be big, but right now no one is sure how to use it, so everyone is painting as big a picture as possible to push a "complete vision" even if it sucks - the path will change soon enough. If you play VR games, many games have different modes of transport and interaction in the VR world. Most modalities suck. No one is quite sure how to acchieve it in a natural way (and without motion sickness). We're still in the learning phase, but i'm sure the market will eventually find a good solution and we'll find what works in VR. The more people excited about it and the more people with VR headsets the faster we'll figure these out.

Depends. If his vision was some sort of capitalistic dystopia where various agents of chaos are able to ricochet disinformation and hatred through the global zeitgeist, then I'd say he was remarkably successful.

Yes, true. However, to push that vision forward in more aggressive ways, I would have expected even more vision. He did try for Xi to name their child... Joking aside. I am missing the debt here for the future.

Maybe it's not so weird to want the Metaverse when we've all just been through shutdowns and office closures. My personal feeling is that the power (killer app) of VR/MR is just creating larger, more interactive, and more private home working environments while keeping the space small and still letting you interact with the parts you need to.

Being able to RL see when someone is nearby and wants to interact (or kids are going crazy) can be somewhat distracting, but ignorable graduality is also key to preventing much worse distraction jumps.

Zuck has FOMO syndrome, and little more. He's got the cash, he's willing to finance development, and will ultimately suffer first mover disadvantages. Anyone trying to unseat him will benefit the technology and its range. But that technology has a long way to go. I hope there is more competition soon, and non-entertainment based simply to increase the perceived range of applications. Until people see examples, they won't conceive of more integrated approaches to using AR/VR technologies.

There is a wide spectrum between sending 3d models to web pages and The Matrix. There are 2 things going on here: 1) making gpu more accessible to the www 2) the headsets/glasses hardware. Everyone seems caught up on 2 when I think the more important thing is 1. I hope the future is to do 3d dev in www by default rather than depending on exporting a unity/unreal/etc thing. I can see www replacing a lot desktop 3d content creation apps if that came to pass.

Refreshing to see someone else realize this, the metaverse will arrive when WASM/WebGPU/WebXR is the dominant way of delivering immersive websites. Our startup is working on providing this support for exporting to the web for Unity and Unreal engines, so virtual worlds can reside inside the. browser.

Cool. It seems like a big step to go from that to where the game engine is a part of the www itself.

I guess the point is that wont happen? The browser just becomes a way to download unreal/unity/… clients written in C++.

Any plans to open-source it? Closed source and "decentralized" (from another comment) doesn't seem to go together.

Didn't the metaverse always suck? It's the setting for dystopian science fiction.

Zuckerberg is running out of rope. He knows he can no longer apologize and promise to be good and have everybody trust him on his word so he can go back to playing his tricks. So now he's resorting to the CEO equivalent of, "Look over there!" to distract everyone from how his company is cashing on destruction.

What if instead this is a move to rebuild a portion of the company in a more sustainable way, but without destroying the revenue stream in the meantime?

Admittedly, FB has a lot of history of mistakes, but they really did get the hard problems in tech (human, social problems) that no one solved yet anywhere. FB seems to actually try to fix their issues... they just make new ones along the way.

Personally, i think anything that distracts FB from focusing on ads and data extraction seems to be good. Lets let them and encourage them use the FB money to finance a new industry research, even if FB doesn't end up the market leader.