Meta does not feel like a different brand from Facebook, given it is its umbrella. As brands they both speak "surveillance", "advertising", "scams", "AI slop", "manipulating your experience", "child harms" and "doom scroll regret".
They should rebrand the headsets back to Oculus, put them in a separate division, remove any dependencies. And never speak of Meta This or Facebook That or Zuckavatraphila again.
Remember how amazing the original NFTs were?
I thought the bunker is only a rumor, but DDGing it, it's "rumor" that's been covered in many news outlets, so, I'm guessing it's real although the news outlets might have some details wrong.
Did Zuckerberg invent Facebook.com or copy it from another person, during college?
I forget where history landed on that one.
And so I wonder if this corporate decision relates to that inventiveness of lack of.
That idea was brought to him by the Winklevoss brothers.
He then built it (allegedly, and having to pay $65m to settle a claim about, while lying to his partners) and scaled the company into what is now Facebook.
They had the foundation of something half reasonable at one point, but their product management clearly got in the way.
I'm pretty sure the buck stops with Mark Zuckerberg.
If he wanted an imaginative environment he'd be in VRChat.
Neither of those extremes are tolerable.
10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.
- All The President's Men
It would have been really interesting to see what Oculus could have become without getting bought. I do think they were a little neat idea, not at all ready for Facebook sized projects.
When I was 20, I preordered a pixel 2 after watching the launch presentation from my university library. One of the "bonuses" for doing so was Google's new headset you put your phone in for a VR experience, along with a new controller.
This "Daydream" only lasted a few years (in software support), but it was a pretty good physical implementation of the "strap your phone to your face for budget VR" concept. I used it more than I'd care to admit for watching movies on a virtual big screen. It'd always give me a big headache between the eyes after an hour and a half, but it was fun every now and again.
A day at the fair.
It even convinced me to buy an Oculus CV1 when those were being heavily discounted!
I never ended up using the CV1 as much as my Daydream, which is saying something. The appeal of VR just isn't that great to me. It's something I find myself wanting to do maybe once or twice a year. Now, never, since the CV1 only ever worked well with Windows, and I can't be bothered to keep a Windows install exclusively for VR (I've tried and failed multiple times with the Linux runtimes).
Not nearly enough drive to deal with base stations, wires, or controllers. And even with the newest headsets that do away with all those, not worth the cash or effort to put on, or the space the headset takes up. Not for "once a month" trips to the fair.
It's insane to me that Meta dumped so much cash into VR. Their fever dream of working in VR gives me a sense of dread and migraine just thinking about it...
"Put on your headset and go into an office meeting!"
It really boggles the mind.
The problem with VR in general is that only children, Gen Alpha, are into it as a demographic. Meta failed to take this into account to reposition Meta VR as either their NES or Roblox into their marketing. They were marketing something only children appreciated to adults who couldn’t see the potential. All adults see is a giant bucket that they don’t want to put on their face.
Don't they screen to hire people who already know that?
There was a time when big tech widely hired dor entry-level jobs.
Also, cramming for the design portion of an interview, and doing it for real, and interacting with the architects/design documents are 2 very different things
The product is the stock price.
Viewed through that lens, keeping the hype going at all costs makes sense.
you could do this forever!
That's what meta(verse) was suppose to build.
Facebook's core competency is copying other successful companies. Sometimes it works.
Imagine being able to solve world hunger, and then… not.
you realize 99% of those announced "investments" have yet to occur as recognizable transactions, correct?
Meanwhile, the barrel of $70b in metaverse waste was actually spent
And the tens of billions spent on AI at Meta... As a result, we're all using "Meta Code CLI" and "ChatBook" and "Geminizuck" right?
Seriously: while we're all on Claude Code using the Anthropic models and many are happy with Gemini and ChatGPT for other stuff, where is Meta's AI offering? I love their Segment Anything Models (SAM) but what the heck has Meta to answer to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI?
Meta stock is priced as a growth stock - not on its current financial returns but on what the market believes it will do in the future. It has been priced like this from the start because it has been growing since the start.
As soon as it stops being able to convince the market it is still growing, then the stock price drops to what the business's current financials dictate, which will be a huge drop. That huge drop has severe negative consequences for everyone involved in that decision. Spending tens of billions on the Metaverse project was better, even though it failed, because it created a growth story they could sell to the market.
So now that's gone they need another growth story. Given the current state of the tech world, that's probably AI-related. And they probably need their own models as part of it.
They can't just "survive the shift" because it's not really about survival. They need to be part of the shift, so that they can convince the market that they're still growing.
"A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about some real money."
Billions. $70 billion since 2021 to be exact.
And it is so simple - just listen to your users and give them what they want - which seems to be VR cat girls.
I do believe that the recent Meta headsets pulled in a lot of users who will stay, thanks to their price point and performance.