I'm sure FB would love to be able to spend 2x on salaries if it came with a guarantee of turning the metaverse into a successful business venture, or of grabbing all the attention hours currently flowing to TikTok.
It's hard to claim that a project failed because its budget was too big.
In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class. Healthcare is just the same.
The causal relationship is in the opposite direction: high salaries cause high housing costs. Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before. There are also plenty of places with low rent that have higher tech salaries than places with higher rents (compare essentially any US city to Toronto).
> In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class.
At least in California, there's not that much overlap between tech company investors and landowners. The housing ownership is much more distributed, and often to "mom and pop" landlords. This is the flow of money in Silicon Valley (expressed in a slightly comic manner): https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1400165321609199620
It's a bit different in other locations with more consolidation in land ownership, but even there, I doubt there's much overlap (I have less knowledge of housing dynamics outside California, because they actually change, so I'm just guessing here).
I think it's actually both - when tech companies enter a new town, they tend to hire boatloads of people, placing pressure on local housing markets, and thus raising prices - and landlords or people willing to sell and relocate to take a quick and easy profit know that the new class of people has substantial money to pay.
What I was referring to was stuff like [1] or [2] - investors with no real option to park "dumb money" (aka funds that are structured to invest into low-ish risk markets) have discovered that soaking up residential real estate is a good way to invest that money.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/investors-bought-third-us-ho...
It just happened that out of their control 1. Apple squeezed them out of ads revenue 2. Market went to shit
I hate Facebook as a company but I don’t see them making strategic mistakes…. Everyone is getting fired everywhere
I'm skeptical. With all their money and knowledge and whatnot, they've only managed to create something that looks like a dated console party game but not more. I don't see how that's the future.
Furthermore, do they expect everyone to buy a... say... $400 headset to use the Metaverse? The low entry barrier was probably one of the biggest reasons for the success of Facebook. If you need specialized equipment nobody will use it.
that's the point of R&D and long shot, if it was possible already it's not a long shot :/
Meta just needs a killer feature for the Metaverse. During the pandemic they bet hard on office-by-VR, but they moved too slowly missed the pandemic and many other deadlines before making a good product.
Nobody bought an iPhone or iPad because of Facebook. You could also install the Facebook app on that, but you could also use your notebook or your desktop pc or your cheap Android phone or whatnot to use Facebook. Most people already had some "Facebook ready" device at home.
Nobody will buy an Oculus headset if its main/sole use is the Metaverse.
Zuck is betting that more people will use VR in the future, and if you believe that hypothesis then it makes sense to invest infinite money in making sure your company becomes the Apple of VR instead of the Nokia.
How wisely that infinite VR money is being spent is another matter.
We'll come back in a few years or decades time to see who will transform the glasses into another platform, just like the watch and the phone did.
The company cannot innovate and has bet the farm on their ability to innovate.
I’ve said it before: Facebook should monetise WhatsApp via payments (real payments, not crypto) and other services. That’s something within their capability and very much within their reach. Maybe they’re seeing that as a backup when VR fails, but the longer they leave it the bigger the risk someone else takes that market.
Marketplace?
Like, from a margin perspective I get why they didn't want to do this, but it would have been a fantastic hedge against what happened with Apple and would probably have prevented Shopify from ever scaling.
software - nope, it's all new, they can't do it
It seems a bit arbirtrary to pick high salaries as the reason for it. And to not blame spending billions on unprofitable projects like the metaverse, or having their profits affected by Apple's restrictions on tracking, or the steady decline in user experience. or the general image of the company being affected by a long list of scandals... <<< I would blame these factors before I point at graduates who earn above the market average.