6 ms·

This sounds like a common and generic enough business requirement. Isn't there something off the shelf that they could have used instead?

quineoa 6y ago
There’s a lot. Cisco makes them if you have their conference room hardware. Any new tech corporate office (and some non tech) will have some sort of hardware that lets you dial into the meeting and or reserve the conference room.
ufmace 6y ago
In my experience, most of the off the shelf systems for stuff like this doesn't work very well. Even when it does, it's not extensible. I could see it being appealing to have a more customizable in-house system, at least when you have as much engineering talent as Facebook probably does.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Also when you want to train your in house engineering to make hardware, good to produce something internal and dog food it.
whoisjuan 6y ago
There are many reasons why Facebook could prefer going with homegrown hardware: 1) It allows them to actually work with hardware and cross pollinate knowledge to their consumer hardware businesses. And I’m not talking only about the hardware itself but all the institutional knowledge required to negotiate with vendors, outsource circuit design and procure parts. 2) They can create one device that is multi-purpose like this one and control every low level detail so it can be used even for security critical tasks. 3) They can test the devices against their own infrastructure and collect low level data that is useful for developing video/voice services and encrypted services in real case scenarios. In general it just makes sense. Facebook’s market cap is 6X larger than Cisco and it employs 50k people. At that scale and for a company like FB, this doesn’t sound crazy.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Unless I’m missing something, none of those reasons sound terribly compelling to me, given we’re talking about a social media company. Facebook is fundamentally not a hardware company, things like Oculus notwithstanding.
  - alrs 6y ago
    There's some projection-psychodrama to it, but it goes along with the tape on Zuckerberg's webcam: they really don't want Google, Amazon, or their Chinese competitors on their corporate network, especially not with cameras and microphones.
  - whoisjuan 6y ago
    Not a hardware company yet. There was a time where Amazon and Google were not hardware companies. But I think saying they are not a hardware company is a bit unfair. Oculus by itself is a tremendously hard and complex hardware business. Portal less so, but it’s still a meaningful device with a lot of complexity. Also Facebook infrastructure must have hundreds of proprietary hardware elements that are built specifically for their own use cases. But I get what you’re saying. From all the tech behemoths, FB is the by far the least experienced in hardware. But I think it’s pretty clear that FB sees hardware as a column of their long term vision. That alone is enough reason to invest on developing your own hardware.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    How about just as an exercise in actually having fun? I'm sure there are several qualified hardware engineers at Facebook and the company has plenty of money. All of the off-the-shelf solutions to this problem are complete garbage, so they just decided to make a better one. For fun.
  - nl 6y ago
    Facebook started building their own hardware prior to 2011 (when they open sourced their designs): https://about.fb.com/news/2011/04/facebook-launches-open-compute-project/ https://about.fb.com/news/2011/04/facebook-launches-open-com...
  - 6y ago
mdriley 6y ago
Sure, it's easy enough to find network-attached screens. The hard part is giving those screens access to anything without them showing up as vectors for every Red Team exercise. Gizmos are used for basically any screen at Facebook that needs to display "live" information -- conference rooms, building maps, monitoring dashboards, etc. Each one has a provisioned identity protected by secure boot and hardware root of trust. They have a minimum of onboard storage (maybe even nothing mutable/persistent after boot?) so they're not a foothold for persistence.
- rkachowski 6y ago
  So they're essentially Facebook's internal raspberry pi with a ton of accessories + focus on not becoming security nightmares?
temikus 6y ago
Sure, but it’s either too expensive (Cisco), too unreliable (MIMO) or both (Tandberg). Source: used to be a Service Desk tech for a giant conglomerate.

quineoa 6y ago

There’s a lot. Cisco makes them if you have their conference room hardware. Any new tech corporate office (and some non tech) will have some sort of hardware that lets you dial into the meeting and or reserve the conference room.

ufmace 6y ago

In my experience, most of the off the shelf systems for stuff like this doesn't work very well. Even when it does, it's not extensible. I could see it being appealing to have a more customizable in-house system, at least when you have as much engineering talent as Facebook probably does.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Also when you want to train your in house engineering to make hardware, good to produce something internal and dog food it.

whoisjuan 6y ago

There are many reasons why Facebook could prefer going with homegrown hardware: 1) It allows them to actually work with hardware and cross pollinate knowledge to their consumer hardware businesses. And I’m not talking only about the hardware itself but all the institutional knowledge required to negotiate with vendors, outsource circuit design and procure parts. 2) They can create one device that is multi-purpose like this one and control every low level detail so it can be used even for security critical tasks. 3) They can test the devices against their own infrastructure and collect low level data that is useful for developing video/voice services and encrypted services in real case scenarios. In general it just makes sense. Facebook’s market cap is 6X larger than Cisco and it employs 50k people. At that scale and for a company like FB, this doesn’t sound crazy.

pmiller2 6y ago
Unless I’m missing something, none of those reasons sound terribly compelling to me, given we’re talking about a social media company. Facebook is fundamentally not a hardware company, things like Oculus notwithstanding.
- alrs 6y ago
  There's some projection-psychodrama to it, but it goes along with the tape on Zuckerberg's webcam: they really don't want Google, Amazon, or their Chinese competitors on their corporate network, especially not with cameras and microphones.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  Not a hardware company yet. There was a time where Amazon and Google were not hardware companies. But I think saying they are not a hardware company is a bit unfair. Oculus by itself is a tremendously hard and complex hardware business. Portal less so, but it’s still a meaningful device with a lot of complexity. Also Facebook infrastructure must have hundreds of proprietary hardware elements that are built specifically for their own use cases. But I get what you’re saying. From all the tech behemoths, FB is the by far the least experienced in hardware. But I think it’s pretty clear that FB sees hardware as a column of their long term vision. That alone is enough reason to invest on developing your own hardware.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  How about just as an exercise in actually having fun? I'm sure there are several qualified hardware engineers at Facebook and the company has plenty of money. All of the off-the-shelf solutions to this problem are complete garbage, so they just decided to make a better one. For fun.
- nl 6y ago
  Facebook started building their own hardware prior to 2011 (when they open sourced their designs): https://about.fb.com/news/2011/04/facebook-launches-open-compute-project/ https://about.fb.com/news/2011/04/facebook-launches-open-com...
- 6y ago

mdriley 6y ago

Sure, it's easy enough to find network-attached screens. The hard part is giving those screens access to anything without them showing up as vectors for every Red Team exercise. Gizmos are used for basically any screen at Facebook that needs to display "live" information -- conference rooms, building maps, monitoring dashboards, etc. Each one has a provisioned identity protected by secure boot and hardware root of trust. They have a minimum of onboard storage (maybe even nothing mutable/persistent after boot?) so they're not a foothold for persistence.

rkachowski 6y ago
So they're essentially Facebook's internal raspberry pi with a ton of accessories + focus on not becoming security nightmares?

temikus 6y ago

Sure, but it’s either too expensive (Cisco), too unreliable (MIMO) or both (Tandberg). Source: used to be a Service Desk tech for a giant conglomerate.