It's easy with the benefit of hindsight to say a bold investment that didn't pan out was a crazy move.

In this case, it was also easy to say it was a dumb idea contemporaneously.

Unless you were the one of the people saying that this was a dumb idea from the beginning. IIRC there were quite a few people who thought that.

I think you missed the joke, the first line says it was a bad idea in hindsight, the second line says it was also a pretty bad idea in foresight.

I love it when megacorps misinvest billions. Opens space for a competition that didn't.

It's actually kind of amazing that there's not any real consequence to making that bad call. It sucked up a lot of energy, lots of people tried to stake and early adopter position in the metaverse and it turns out everyone just didn't want that.

I think they could have made more money if they built games into facebook. At probably a fraction of the cost really.

Reminds me of Marks 'pivot to video' on facebook [0]

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...

I believe they tried to court game developers via Facebook platform at one point. I recall giving Civilization Network a shot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_World

> there's not any real consequence to making that bad call

There is: they've spent a fortune of their money on building it.

Is that a real consequence? Are Facebook shutting their doors? Is Mark Zuckerberg no longer wealthy?

Yes, of course. It's not the sort of consequence that would be meted out by a parent, but it's appropriate. Facebook is much the poorer for it, as is appropriate for them trying a new thing.

That is exactly how Microsoft became so dominant in personal computing starting in the 1990s. While it's true that Microsoft did some unethical things, they succeeded primarily because Novell, WordPerfect, Borland, and IBM all made huge strategic errors and essentially knocked themselves out of the game. They missed inflection points that transformed the entire industry. Microsoft's errors were all smaller, and easier to recover.

> What a crazy move.

Not at all! Done right, we could have ended up in a sci-fi future strapped to our VR headsets all day long. But the real life, physical technology is just not here yet (maybe it's impossible and never will be), the software they invented for their lacking headsets is disgustingly bad (Horizon Worlds) and there is no nameworthy content.

I assume his advisors and tech leads all pulled the wool over his eyes and sold him their lofty dreams as tangible reality.

> Done right, we could have ended up in a sci-fi future strapped to our VR headsets all day long

When I read this phrase, the spaceship from Wall-E comes to mind. But in reality, it would probably look a little bit more dystopian than what Pixar imagined...

Most people would say they HATE this future, but most people would LOVE this future. As passive infotainment consumers, stereotypical scroolers, they are already glued to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, reddit and whatever other digital dopamine dispenser and skinner box there. Significantly improve on that with pleasant, increased or even full immersion and you got the next big thing.

...they say, posting on HN, a slightly watered down dopamine dispenser brought to you by the people that made Reddit happen.

I still think VR might be a hard sell for most people. As dumb as large groups of people may be, it's clear that people are ditching FB and slowly backing away from a lot of social media. It's tricking out that it's not always a great thing, and there is legit buy-in from huge chunks of the Left and Right to restrict what social media does.

All of this stuff is locked behind AR/VR glasses that are close enough in size, shape, and weight to normal sunglasses. If someone manages to build that, it'll be the biggest thing to hit computing since the smartphone. If not, it's all going nowhere.

> ...they say, posting on HN, a slightly watered down dopamine dispenser brought to you by the people that made Reddit happen.

I by no means wanted to exclude myself from the groups I so derogatively named. Hacker News is pure infotainment to me. The quality is above reddit though, but that's not a high bar.

> it's clear that people are ditching FB and slowly backing away from a lot of social media

Are they? To me it looks like TikTok addiction and stupidity is continuously peaking.

I'd say HN quality is way way better than Reddit, entirely due to the audience. Reddit is very much anti-knowledge, anti-solution, anti-reason whereas HN features intelligent discussions, often supported by facts.

It's really not clear that people are ditching FB. They showed 20% more ads last quarter than in the quarter the year before.

You forgot to add miserable and depressed to your list

I mean, the Wall-E one already looked _extremely_ dystopian.

The video for "Do the Evolution" by Pearl Jam.

From what I understand, he would like to be remembered similarly to Steve Jobs, as an inventor of the future. I think this was his way of doing that.

People loved Steve Jobs though whereas people hate Mark.

He failed to produce his own brand. The only thing that comes to mind when anyone thinks about Mark is "Facebook scandals", "looks, moves and talks like a reptiloid/robot" and "the mataverse that no one wanted failure (no legs!)". I bet he wishes he would have been what Elon Musk was, someone with pretty much his own cult. Elon Musk still has his cult followers and online knights despite his increasingly erratic behavior and general unpleasantness.

Not everyone loves Steve Jobs. Lots of people don't. I don't.

I do hate that Zuck ruined the word meta for everyone.

Steve Jobs was a misanthropic douche who routinely abused his own staff and screwed over many of those around him, including, famously, Woz.

He just had really, really good marketing, and products that landed at just the right time.

Your characterization of him is correct, but he didn't accomplish what he did through sheer luck and marketing; he also had a really good sense of what (average) consumers wanted in a technology product, which his competitors seemed to mostly lack.

Steve Jobs "landing products at just the right time" is a synonym for "was a wildly successful businessman".

The only thing that is vastly better in VR than in reality are horror games. While one can laugh on how silly/unfrightening the movie nightmare on the Elm street is, a proper VR jump scare can easily lead to a heart attack when following some quiet period of gameplay. Not sure if this was the intended effect as it would likely reduce the number of consumers once for all.

I think what would be awesome is if he just opened it all right up, the specs, the hardware, the whole thing. It would spur a bunch of hackers and cool innovation.

Without doing something like this, I don't think it will go far.