4 ms·

Zuckerberg's metaverse obsession is driving some Facebook employees nuts

12 points by tcmb 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
version_five 4y ago
Is there an example of a project like this that has actually worked? I mean a top down, well funded but not well defined effort to first define something and then build it. I've see this at a smaller scale before, where for whatever reason a startup with no real product gets a lot of money and just churns through strategies and plans, having a new definition for everything every few weeks, spinning engineers and sales in all directions and never actually moving towards something. It doesn't work. How are they going to avoid this? If this was landing on the moon, or even building an electric car, I get how you could challenge and organization to do it. But for these pre-product market fit companies, what they need is organic growth driven by users and the market. I don't see how you emulate that. Personally I think the 10b per year would work way better investing in startups in the space and seeing what sticks
- dtagames 4y ago
  There is nothing to invent in the metaverse space that hasn't already adequately been covered by Second Life and others. FB could build an SL clone with perhaps improved tech or a different business model based on advertising (blech). But there's nothing to envision here. He's spending the money to get into a business they're late getting into which isn't really a business anybody wants anyway, as demonstrated by the failures of all the other VR and meta platforms to get any serious traction. The metaverse today is Fortnite. Good luck to FB on becoming Epic Games. I don't think so.
- pizza 4y ago
  Google Wave. But I think they should have had the foresight to realize that this was a minimum 10 year commitment type project, because it was clearly complex enough to take around 10 years to stabilize into actual internet intrastructure with complex social structure. E.g. imagine if instead of sharing Google Colab notebook URLs in various machine learning discords or twitter networks, we could edit forks of notebooks directly in the communication medium, as threads.. This was the type of vision they should have been realizing.
  - akhmatova 4y ago
    Google Wave Which has been dead for how many years now? The commenter was asking for an example of a project that "actually worked". In, you know, the actual consumer adoption sense.
wmf 4y ago
The company is literally called Meta. Did people think Zuck was joking?
mgh2 4y ago
You mean "desperation"...

12 points by tcmb 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Is there an example of a project like this that has actually worked? I mean a top down, well funded but not well defined effort to first define something and then build it. I've see this at a smaller scale before, where for whatever reason a startup with no real product gets a lot of money and just churns through strategies and plans, having a new definition for everything every few weeks, spinning engineers and sales in all directions and never actually moving towards something. It doesn't work. How are they going to avoid this? If this was landing on the moon, or even building an electric car, I get how you could challenge and organization to do it. But for these pre-product market fit companies, what they need is organic growth driven by users and the market. I don't see how you emulate that. Personally I think the 10b per year would work way better investing in startups in the space and seeing what sticks

dtagames 4y ago
There is nothing to invent in the metaverse space that hasn't already adequately been covered by Second Life and others. FB could build an SL clone with perhaps improved tech or a different business model based on advertising (blech). But there's nothing to envision here. He's spending the money to get into a business they're late getting into which isn't really a business anybody wants anyway, as demonstrated by the failures of all the other VR and meta platforms to get any serious traction. The metaverse today is Fortnite. Good luck to FB on becoming Epic Games. I don't think so.
pizza 4y ago
Google Wave. But I think they should have had the foresight to realize that this was a minimum 10 year commitment type project, because it was clearly complex enough to take around 10 years to stabilize into actual internet intrastructure with complex social structure. E.g. imagine if instead of sharing Google Colab notebook URLs in various machine learning discords or twitter networks, we could edit forks of notebooks directly in the communication medium, as threads.. This was the type of vision they should have been realizing.
- akhmatova 4y ago
  Google Wave Which has been dead for how many years now? The commenter was asking for an example of a project that "actually worked". In, you know, the actual consumer adoption sense.

wmf 4y ago

The company is literally called Meta. Did people think Zuck was joking?

mgh2 4y ago

You mean "desperation"...