This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die.
Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can.
Edit: clarify
(In general the maximize profit meme does need to die tho)
which was added thanks to your parent comment.
The relevant legal standard is "Don't abuse the company for your own ends", not "you must do everything to get as much money as quickly as possible, consequences be damned!"
This would be an interesting test case. The limits on what he can or cannot do are remarkably ill-defined.
Those organizations and people that adopt the meme become more powerful and choke out all those entities that don't.
You can't just choose not to pursue profits at any cost if there are ANY competing entities out there that choose to do so.
Why that is is where the fundamental disagreement is. One of the proposed reasons is too much regulation, the other is too little. It's (in my opinion) probably both - too much poorly applied, and not enough where it's needed.
Hunt around for just a few minutes on the google search, "do corporations have a legal obligation to maximize share value," and you'll see that what you said is the myth that gets repeated -- this one link probably summarizes the argument against the myth in the most neutral way:
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
The second paragraph gives two such cases: AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow and Shlensky v. Wrigley.
To summarize the case, Ford was sitting on a huge amount of cash. Some shareholders, in particular the Dodge brothers, wanted it paid out as dividends. Ford said no, and specifically:
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes"
Had he said less, or even nothing, that would have been fine. Management is entitled to make whatever business-related decisions they see fit (the "business judgement" rule). If the Dodges disagree with those decisions, they can sell their shares and reinvest the money elsewhere.
Had Ford said more "...and we think doing so will grow the market for our cars", "help us retain our skilled and motivated workforce" or something else vaguely related to success of Ford Motor Company, that also would have been fine.
Unfortunately, what Ford said fell into a gap where it was clear that what he was doing was not a business decision; he was using the shareholders' money for his own personal ends, charitable though they may be. Shlensky v. Wrigley is an interesting comparison. The Cubs refused to have night baseball games due to some...idiosyncratic beliefs about the "true nature" of the sport. This reduced their potential profits, but was nevertheless okay because chasing after the "purists" OR going for mass-market appeal are both reasonable business decisions.
(This is not my argument; it's made in this article: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1384/)
> At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule
What is the business judgement rule?
> The business judgment rule is a case law-derived doctrine in corporations law that courts defer to the business judgment of corporate executives.
In other words, if the CEO of a company says that he did something because e.g. he believed it was better for the long-term health of the company, the court will generally take his word for it, barring evidence of deliberate malfeasance.
What one cannot do is as Ford did, which was to deliberately try and hurt other shareholders.
That's the wrong question.
The right question is "how many FB users would accept a free headset that advertisers paid for in exchange for access to your data and exclusive rights to place ads in front of you?"
The social dynamics are completely different. Second Life showed that very clearly.
The three biggest things in Second Life were fantasy consumerism, fantasy entrepreneurship, and fantasy sex.
Unless FB is getting into those markets it's going to find the metaverse a tough sell.
Not least because the whole point of fantasy is that it's not really you. So that immediately conflicts with FB's only-real-identities dogma.
I feel like we’re all hoping that there will be a VR version of the early web, free and open, and mostly just neat things to connect with or about. I worry there is increasingly no chance of that.
On the other hand, oculus is state of the art in virtual reality. I don't know if any other hardware or ecosystem as well developed as theirs is.
Maybe a vocal minority like us HN-folk, but I don't think that by ourselves we really matter in terms of numbers.
It was like the Matrix scene where Neo was learning, then leaves the simulation and says "I know Kung Fu".
She used computers for social media and looking up recipes, so not very savvy at all. I don't think there's a correlation between interest in VR and technicality. Maybe between _vocal_ interest in VR and technicality.
The internet network and it's forbears was funded largely by the US DoD (not the army specifically I don't think?) (and as a huge portion of academic computer science continues to be, btw), but most of the people involved in creating the internet and the things built on top of it, technologically and socially, including those allocating significant material resources to it's development, were not in fact military personnel (let alone in the army specifically?).
What I meant is that the people involved in building it were focused on things other than making money. (This may be hard to believe, that any human endeavor can take place except motivated by extreme profits, but it's the case). They were also not, by and large on the whole, especially motivated by military advantage, although some may have been, including some of the funders. But it was not in fact, largely, built as a national-security-focused or military/militarized network (sure, subsets of it were, there was a MILNET; it was a part of ARPANET and later separated from it, which shows that it was not the whole); nor was it built originally as a giant surveillance system for the purposes of commerce and profit (or law enforcement).
$300 * 3 billion people, so $900 Billion give or take which coincidentally is right around the market cap of the entire company.
$200+ billion. They can't afford it. They couldn't get the manufacturing for it, either.
A very good point. I think the financing would be less of an issue, honestly; $200 billion a lot of cash up front, but spread out over five or ten years it's well within their FCF if they wanted to allocate it that way.
EDIT: As another comment pointed out, FB might also be able to convince advertisers to subsidize some (or all) of the costs of "free" headsets for the masses, if they wanted to try this scheme.
About 0.6-1 trillion dollars, give or take.
20-50 times what they earn per user.
Of course, the essence of your point is true: Facebook doesn't make as much per year per user on average as a headset costs.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...
0. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/oculus-will...,
3 billion fb users x 100 per unit = 300 billion
A letter to everyone would cost 3 billion
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 for users, but:
a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally* able to give up ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, basically
b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?
And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed).
* in the sense of "this is the fundamental basis and goal of the company," not in a U.S.-founding-document sense