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> In the end the goal of a company (whether you agree with it our not) is not to get as big as possible but to generate as much cash for its shareholders as pos

> In the end the goal of a company (whether you agree with it our not) is not to get as big as possible but to generate as much cash for its shareholders as possible Man, why does everyone have the same values nowadays as Milton Friedman and The Warthog? Relevant video clip: (NSFW, very offensive language) https://youtu.be/7j1850-qlm8?t=19 https://youtu.be/7j1850-qlm8?t=19 Facebook's (stated) mission isn't to make money or get big, it's to bring people together. If they can make VR user-friendly and ubiquitous, I think that will serve their stated goal. If Facebook just decided to hunker down and count their money, they'd be doomed to eventually fade away just like so many tech juggernauts have in the past.

_carbyau_ 4y ago
> Facebook's (stated) mission isn't to make money or get big, it's to bring people together. The business plan so far seems to be: 1. Make VR work 2. ??? 3. People come together! Smallprint: make lots of money along the way... I am interested as to whether there exists a concrete plan for step 2 but I am dubious of this direction.
- paganel 4y ago
  > 3. People come together! Difficult to make them come together without throwing up, literally. I almost got to the point where only thinking about the abstract concept of VR makes me a little dizzy. But the logic goes something like this: Zuckerberg has built a $1 trillion company already => he knows what he's doing => we should trust him with the tens of billions of dollars he's throwing at this, trust him that is compared to the schmucks that say that this won't go anywhere, they haven't built $1 trillion companies themselves. I predict that around the mark of $100-150 billion thrown down the VR drain some share-holders will actually start to throw some hard questions at Zuckerberg, and in another one or two years after this the project will have the fate of Google+.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    I dunno if Facebook is going to make it there, but I think their goal for VR is feasible and achievable. All the functionality is there on their platform and others right now, but it's too slow to boot up and not polished enough yet. Unfortunately, tiny performance hiccups in VR will immediately nauseate most people, not to mention the friction of having to put on the headset, boot it up, navigate through slow menus, launch an app, log into a room... If you could toss on your VR helmet for 2 minutes to pop into VR and chat with someone the way you can open a Zoom call today, it'd be a huge quality of life improvement for remote work. Or like Carmack was saying recently, you could get to a point where it's cheaper to mail out a thousand headsets than to host a conference in person Tangential edit: Man, how nuts is it that Facebook is throwing billions of dollars a year into this? Palmer Luckey invented modern VR in his spare time as a kid living in a trailer next to his parents' house. You've got VR startups out there making interesting devices, amazing multi-user worlds, and all sorts of other things for a few million bucks per company. It makes sense that if they have the money they should try to do something useful with it, and silicon valley engineers/hardware development don't come cheap, but that's just such an incredible amount of money.

_carbyau_ 4y ago

> Facebook's (stated) mission isn't to make money or get big, it's to bring people together. The business plan so far seems to be: 1. Make VR work 2. ??? 3. People come together! Smallprint: make lots of money along the way... I am interested as to whether there exists a concrete plan for step 2 but I am dubious of this direction.

paganel 4y ago
> 3. People come together! Difficult to make them come together without throwing up, literally. I almost got to the point where only thinking about the abstract concept of VR makes me a little dizzy. But the logic goes something like this: Zuckerberg has built a $1 trillion company already => he knows what he's doing => we should trust him with the tens of billions of dollars he's throwing at this, trust him that is compared to the schmucks that say that this won't go anywhere, they haven't built $1 trillion companies themselves. I predict that around the mark of $100-150 billion thrown down the VR drain some share-holders will actually start to throw some hard questions at Zuckerberg, and in another one or two years after this the project will have the fate of Google+.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I dunno if Facebook is going to make it there, but I think their goal for VR is feasible and achievable. All the functionality is there on their platform and others right now, but it's too slow to boot up and not polished enough yet. Unfortunately, tiny performance hiccups in VR will immediately nauseate most people, not to mention the friction of having to put on the headset, boot it up, navigate through slow menus, launch an app, log into a room... If you could toss on your VR helmet for 2 minutes to pop into VR and chat with someone the way you can open a Zoom call today, it'd be a huge quality of life improvement for remote work. Or like Carmack was saying recently, you could get to a point where it's cheaper to mail out a thousand headsets than to host a conference in person Tangential edit: Man, how nuts is it that Facebook is throwing billions of dollars a year into this? Palmer Luckey invented modern VR in his spare time as a kid living in a trailer next to his parents' house. You've got VR startups out there making interesting devices, amazing multi-user worlds, and all sorts of other things for a few million bucks per company. It makes sense that if they have the money they should try to do something useful with it, and silicon valley engineers/hardware development don't come cheap, but that's just such an incredible amount of money.