Growing up I was used to there being more useful and fun tech gadgets than I could ever afford. Now it’s like unless they own your entire online presence they don’t want your money. Give me that dumb iPod v1.0 which gets sand in the wheel and lasts an hour on battery but for VR. The idea was all your music on the go and it met that goal.
For VR it should be hands free/hands minimal portable productivity. Give that shitty resolution and battery life. I would take navigating YouTube, PDFs, email at the lowest res feasible and 2 hour batteries and isn’t gigantic and prevents you from normal activities. Don’t build a multi billion dollar platform.
Why? Who else would want that?
But I'm not a Gadget Guy. Why would I want shitty YouTube in VR when I have good YouTube on my phone?
And that's not inherently a bad thing. Despite his often shrill detractors, Tim Cook, who's definitely a "bureaucracy expert" more than he is a "product expert", has done a darn good job leading Apple since Steve Jobs' untimely death. The thing is, he knows to listen to the product experts, and to put the really good ones in positions of some power within the hierarchy.
The problem comes when your "bureaucracy experts" only value what they understand: Bureaucracy. Numbers. Finances, especially in the short-term sense.
Now, I honestly don't think this is precisely Zuckerberg's problem. From what I've seen, I don't think he's necessarily a "bureaucracy expert" himself—but nor is he a "product expert" in the same sense as someone like Jobs or Ive; he helped to create the original Facebook, but I don't believe he's ever come up with any other products that have seen any real success (though correct me if I'm wrong). He's more of a founder who rode a wave of money to where he is, and bought into the idea that that meant he was somehow smarter than everyone else.
Same. No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame.
There are fairly serious differences between the release of the iPod and the announcement of Facebook's shift to "Meta", and one guy being wrong one time, however famously, does not have any implications for other people being wrong in completely different circumstances, so this feels pointlessly dismissive.
Easy way to prove this is to ask people what the obvious winners and losers will be in the next 5 years, and then see how they've allocated they're investments to that. If you can predict the market so obviously, you'll be rich.
I dunno about you, but I and basically everyone in my circles at the time agreed that it was most likely a terrible idea.
Until and unless there's a truly convenient piece of hardware to get one into a virtual space—I'm talking weight and bulk comparable to prescription eyeglasses, no wires going beyond your body (ie, maybe a pack at the belt/pocket/something like that), and some form of extremely intuitive UI—you're not going to get people interested in regular interactions in a VR/AR space.
Frankly, even once we do have something like that, I think it unlikely that many people would choose to do things like meetings in a virtual space over something simpler like Zoom, even if they did already own the hardware.
And none of these views have changed over the past few years.
No; I think Zuck has been far too isolated and out of touch with how regular people operate for too long, and when faced with, as you say, the fact that Facebook was only running on other people's platforms—and it became clear that no one was interested in making Facebook their platform, like by buying a Facebook phone—he convinced himself that this was The Next Big Thing based on sheer desperation.