46 ms·

Meta stock price drops more than 20%

256 points by derwiki 4y ago

adamsmith143 4y ago
I only feel bad that I haven't been short Meta.
- dymk 4y ago
  It’s never too late to start!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mrtobo 4y ago
  Tested a short bet yesterday. Was not disappoint.
castrodd 4y ago
It’s about damn time.
HeckaSmart 4y ago
I personally think that the AR/VR will have a big market in the future. The question really is, how far away? 5 years? 10 years? 15 years? And will Meta be one of the winners when it's all said and one? Meta is hellbent on creating a platform so they can be the iOS/App Store instead of just an app. The stock is sliding because we're entering/in a phase where raising money is hard and cash is king. Companies are trying to pull back on investments and bets that might or might not pay off. Meta just told Wallstreet that it doesn't plan to pull back on Metaverse spending in 2023.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  The problem for Meta is that it's almost certainly not going to look like what they're selling with their Metaverse which is some kind of Second Life knockoff. They went all in on a failed plan.
  - wollsmoth 4y ago
    Well if all the end up with is the best hardware that's definitely going to be worth something. But what they really want is the app that people spend all their time on.
    - HeckaSmart 4y ago
      What they really want is to be the iOS and the App Store. They don't want to live under Apple and Google's roofs anymore. They want control. And they want to be the one taxing apps 30% instead of Apple and Google.
      - throwaway4aday 4y ago
        Maybe, they do have their own store for VR apps but they also allow you to connect the headset to a gaming PC and use Steam games. They also support OpenXR. So they don't seem to be building a walled garden, more like a garden with a fence you can step over. Maybe that'll change in the future but if it does they'll piss off a lot of their customers and force them to switch to other hardware.
    - jokethrowaway 4y ago
      I think Valve will get the best hw award. They've been consistently the best since the beginning
      - HeckaSmart 4y ago
        I think Apple will come out with the best hardware. Why? 1. Best mobile SoC designs by far. Not even close. 2. Hardware company at heart. Their culture is built for hardware. 3. Way more supply chain and mass manufacturing experience which means cheaper manufacturing. 4. Hardware designed for iPhone, iPad, Mac can be reused for VR/AR which means lower costs and more economy of scale. IE. M2 is used on both iPad and Macs. M2 cores are derived from A15 from iPhone 13.
      - bwb 4y ago
        My guess is Valve is bought by Apple at some point.
- cube00 4y ago
  I still can't see how anyone would want to wear a headset for 8 hours a day to do their job like their promo videos show. Especially an office based job where their promotional videos show someone working with "large virtual screens" in an "ideal workspace setup". Surely most users would prefer actual screens and work without the headset on all day. Maybe the next hot thing is actually bigger and cheaper screens, not VR headsets.
  - HeckaSmart 4y ago
    I don't. I don't even own a VR headset. I tried the Quest Go or whatever it was called back in 2018. It was awful. I returned it immediately. But I can see GenZ or the generation after GenZ embrace VR/AR. It doesn't have to be wearing a headset. It could be glasses when you're not wearing VR. It could be your phone when you're not wearing VR.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    I still can't picture how anyone is supposed to get any actual work done when they've got that thing on.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - nh23423fefe 4y ago
    I would only want a headset that could give me experiences I couldn't get anywhere else. Being trapped in a box and working sounds like prison.
    - cube00 4y ago
      A prison with sponsored skins for your virtual keyboard and mouse.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      No one's proposing that, Meta was even showing off custom home environments for the Quest Pro https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-pro-exclusive-home-environment-looks-magnificent/ https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-pro-exclusive-home-envi... and you can use it for any other VR experience that you want.
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  they should focus on the B2B use cases, the Metaverse is cringeworthy but the virtual desktop stuff I've seen actually makes me consider buying. They just need to show the ROI vs buying multiple monitors, maybe put out some studies showing their VR meetings are more effective than Zoom, show the productivity boost of being able to use VR to tune out distractions in open offices. Get enterprise customers to buy fleets of VR for their employees and then launch some sort of SaaS marketplace for Meta devices and take a cut. Facebook now has their app platform they've wanted Zuck's focus on social is what's ruining it, plus just the optics of him. He needs to disappear for awhile
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Watch the Quest Pro launch, it's very obviously B2B and pretty much exactly what you're describing sales wise.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    The virtual monitors stuff looks pretty in tiny Internet videos, but doesn't hold up on the actual headset. The resolution of both of the display and passthrough cameras is still abysmal, barely better than Quest2 and a tiny fraction of a real monitor. You can compensate a bit by making the virtual monitors much bigger than a real one, but even that only goes so far. At the end of the day, it's about the same experience as putting a big old 720p TV on your desk. Resolution aside, going with virtual monitors also just shows how primitive the whole thing still is. From a 'workspace in VR' I would expect to get actual window management and UI elements in full 3D space, not just my 2D monitor projected to a virtual rectangle. Microsoft's WMR Portal had that five years ago (not without faults), Meta's attempt feels quite primitive and basic in comparison.
- a4isms 4y ago
  I agree with you. This very much reminds me of Apple's Newton. It was actually quite amazing given the technical constraints imposed on making something to be shipped in volume, but not only was it underpowered for what it tried to be, the "killer app" for mobile devices would turn out to be wireless internet connectivity, and the world simply wasn't ready for that yet. Apple started Newton development in 1987, killed it in 1997 when Jobs returned, and launched iPhone in 2007, arguably the biggest consumer product hit in history. I'm rooting for Meta's demise, but history shows that it's quite possible for a company to try something, fail spectacularly, but come back and get it right when the universe catches up to the ambition. Then again, Palm launched their first device in 1996, and had a big hit. But by the end of 2011, they were done. There are no guarantees that the company creating a market will be the one to profit from it.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Meta's problem is that mark just told wall st. to fuck off. Every investor is screaming to lower costs and he's raising them. It's not next years profit that investors are scared about, it's their lack of control over mark. This earnings report would mean Mark is fired even if he controlled 40% of the votes, it was that reckless.
  - itsoktocry 4y ago
    >But really it's not next years profit that investors are scared about, it's their lack of control over mark. Yeah, when things were booming no one cared about their class C shares that left control of these massive corporations in few hands. STONKS! I sense that will change.
- nstart 4y ago
  To me the issue is that Meta is pushing to attack three challenges at once. On one hand there’s the hardware. Even now, people report motion sickness with the hardware. If you are trying to create a computing interaction medium of the future, these details around accessibility are going to be incredibly important. And I haven’t even mentioned battery life. So meta is working away at this very expensive challenge The second challenge is the interaction model. No one is entirely convinced yet of what interaction with computers should look like in VR. Right now it’s “mouse/touch+windows but in VR. That’s like when TV and cameras first happened and it was theater shows but on the tv screen. So Meta now has to invent or at least shepherd computing integration models and that is also incredibly expensive. And finally there is the metaverse. Technically we all live in the metaverse already. I interact with people I don’t know across forums and social media. I interact with them more than I do with some of the people I know in real life. I play games online which have meta worlds (Minecraft, temtem, and animal crossing for example). I may not have a single game of infinite worlds and meeting places but the concept of a universe within my existing world already exists and it’s served to me by the internet. But Meta wants to make it a ready player one kind of experience where I interact with it through a VR experience. That seems really forced because they are drawing a line in the ground saying that VR is how the metaverse can exist. This is also an expensive bet especially when the interaction model hasn’t been figured out yet. I don’t know where this is heading for meta but their goal of creating the next big computing and interaction platform with app stores that they control instead of apple or google is incredibly ambitious but seemingly poorly executed thus far.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    I don’t disagree with your overarching analysis, but: > And finally there is the metaverse. Technically we all live in the metaverse already. I interact with people I don’t know across forums and social media. Meta properties are already a huge share of this activity. Think FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, …
- kingkawn 4y ago
  When you don’t have to wear an absurd headset
pjc50 4y ago
It's amazing what spending $15bn on a metaverse that everybody immediately laughs at will do to your stock price.
- tail_exchange 4y ago
  I started my Oculus Quest a couple days ago after a small hiatus, and it forced me to create a Meta account and set up a Horizon profile. Looks like Zuck is pushing really hard for his Metaverse thing. Ah, yes please, I would love to be in a VRChat universe flavored with all that Facebook goodness, I can't think of a better way to use my headset.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    that's pretty much the only thing the quest is capable of running
    - tail_exchange 4y ago
      Pretty much. Though you can play anything if you have a link, which is my case. There are other alternatives like the Index, but they are way more expensive.
    - reilly3000 4y ago
      Steam VR doesn’t count? I had to do some hackiness but now it works wirelessly for me, no link cable needed.
  - largepeepee 4y ago
    Forcing me to sign up with my IRL account was the no.1 reason I avoided the oculus. I don't want fb tracking me roleplaying as a catgirl or doing some other degenerate activity with my 3D avatar and "accidentally" leaking data to advertisers or worse, family and friends. With their track record, Facebook is the last company I'll trust with my data. No wonder they had no issue rebranding with such a lousy reputation.
    - 4y ago
PedroBatista 4y ago
It's been "known" Meta would report really bad results for a few days now. Also, Zuck doublespeak about that a few weeks ago with the whole thing about the need to be "more focused" or some kind of "the party is over" type of memo to his employees.
- netrus 4y ago
  The stock dropping 23% tells you that it's (much) worse than expected. That bad news were anticipated (and priced in) makes it even worse.
  - fbn79 4y ago
    I think a so drammatic price sink came from Zuc post on Facebook prospecting even much more capex expenses for 2023. So for sure still another year of bad earnings
- loeg 4y ago
  If it was in any sense "known," the stock wouldn't have moved 25% in a day.
  - PedroBatista 4y ago
    It was public it would be bad, but it was not public it would be this bad. However it was "known" aka a group of people "had the same dream" before today that it would be REALLY bad.
m348e912 4y ago
I've been reserving judgment on Meta's decision to go all in on virtual reality because maybe Zuck knows something we all don't. But his vision reminds me of Second Life circa 1999. I didn't care for it back then and I don't care for it now. Maybe there's something I am missing.
- cube00 4y ago
  The idea of giving your boss Facebook level stalking into your working day isn't as appealing as Zuck hoped.
  - yakshemash 4y ago
    Not to say that Metaverse will necessarily fit the bill, but the question is whether your boss will be interested enough in getting Facebook level stalking power into their employees working day, me thinks.
    - cube00 4y ago
      Employees assess themselves as being the most productive working from home, management assess them as being the least productive. Management absolutely want in person office level control over their employees. Take a look at some of the things Microsoft Purview now tracks (and in some cases had to stop tracking due to backlash)
      - yakshemash 4y ago
        Completely agree with you. My point was that for the majority of workplaces, the choice of introducing or not such invasive tracking tech belongs to the employer. Employees sadly (at least to me) may not have much say in it if Meta puts together a convincing platform for employers.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  Think sony had something similar to this in the ps3 era? Or I am remembering it wrong.
cpurdy 4y ago
Facebook and Google got hit very hard in the recent quarter, but none of the articles point out one of the obvious reasons contributing to their drops: Apple made it significantly harder to track macOS and iOS users, which people tend to be high value targets for advertisements.
- cmsj 4y ago
  Not sure that hurts Google anywhere near as much as it does Facebook?
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  This was priced in last year when facebook said it would cost them $10 billion a year. Google has next to no presence in mobile apps/non-browser ads so I dont think they care much.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >Google has next to no presence in mobile/non-browser ads so I dont think they care much. Uh... what?
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      apple's changes made it harder to use a users profile from one app to target them on another app. All of google's ads are served on a browser so they weren't affected.
      - KoftaBob 4y ago
        When you use a free app that shows you ads, whose ad network do you think is serving those ads?
        colinmhayes 4y ago
        facebook's...
endisneigh 4y ago
Apple will be the one to win VR. They’ll wait until the very last possible moment. All Meta is doing is making their R&D cheaper. Google should bring back Cardboard. Even with crappy quality, people will try it out for $10.
- jadbox 4y ago
  Hololens may give Microsoft a headstart into entering AR/VR for businesses.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- gilrain 4y ago
  It certainly helps that they’re already a hardware company.
- cube00 4y ago
  Certainly seems that way with their entry into the advertising market. Watched and learnt from DoubleClick, Google and Facebook. Cut them off and now it's time to strike.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  You're right about apple. Focusing on execution rather than bleeding edge innovation has certainly been a winning strategy.
  - criddell 4y ago
    I think you're right. On top of that, Apple isn't afraid to ignore the low end. Meta and Microsoft can have that market.
    - akmarinov 4y ago
      Even if they try to get the low end - they fail at it, their customers just buy the high end stuff, see iPhone 5C, iPhone Mini, iPhone Plus now - all "cheaper" and cancelled or not doing well.
aclatuts 4y ago
It is no surprise, the problem is betting on when this would happen. The Metaverse is far outside their competency. And renaming their company to Meta makes acquiring another company with a Metaverse product impossible, without being a laughing stock, unlike with the Instagram purchase.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  The thing it reminds me of most is when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball.
- lifeplusplus 4y ago
  Fortnite is better metaverse as far as metaverse go
Invictus0 4y ago
Lowest point since 2016, not adjusting for inflation. Damn.
- compumike 4y ago
  META stock chart adjusted for inflation: https://totalrealreturns.com/s/META https://totalrealreturns.com/s/META (Will include today's change only after end-of-day data is released, probably around 8pm ET / 5pm PT.) Regardless, will likely still land in the 2015-2016 time range.
mproud 4y ago
I read a quote saying managers at Facebook were struggling to get their own employees to want to have meetings on Metaverse. It’s not a good sign when the very product they’re pushing currently sucks where people don’t even want to use it.
- cube00 4y ago
  This is one thing Microsoft had right in the Windows NT days, dog food the product. If the devs you're paying aren't willing to use it, there's no chance the paying customers will touch it.
shubhamjain 4y ago
I don't believe that Metaverse would be a success, but I still think $META could be a good value buy at this point. Investors are forgetting that $META still has an asset that it has not realized the potential of—WhatsApp. The app has 2B monthly active users and many of them are non-tech savvy who would loath at the idea of switching to another app. There are ~500M users in India alone[1]. Can you believe that? 40%+ of the country actively using an app? The advertising potential is insane. But again, it's only speculation that the potential can be realized. I do think it doesn't hurt to have one risky bet in your portfolio. [1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/whatsapp-may-soon-touch-500-million-users-in-india-despite-new-privacy-policy-claims-report-1758344-2021-01-12 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/whatsapp-may...
- robofanatic 4y ago
  ads on Whatsapp?? PLEASE NO!!
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >The advertising potential is insane. You realize the "just slap ads on it" monetization method is going away, right? Outside of regulation (ie GDPR) and platform control (ATT), it's 2022; do people really still believe that flooding a product people love with ads won't change user behaviour?
  - foobarian 4y ago
    It may work for a year or two. That's still a year or two more of insane revenue than nothing.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  Meta might be a good value buy at these prices if they launched a dividend. But their free cash flow dropped close to zero in this last quarter, so that won't be happening.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
mabbo 4y ago
It's going to be an interest year or two if all tech stocks continue to fall. Most of these companies pay largely in RSUs for more senior ICs and managers. RSUs strike a price at the grant date. If you're paid 50% in stock, and the stock falls by 24%, you just took a 12% pay cut. Meanwhile, the new guy doing the same job as you got their RSUs granted at today's stock price, but the target value for someone at that job level- no pay cut for them, effectively. It's a recipe for a lot of people swapping jobs just to keep their incomes at the same level. Or, companies can do as my employer did (bias note) and switch to a new comp system that avoids these problems: https://news.shopify.com/rewriting-the-story-of-compensation https://news.shopify.com/rewriting-the-story-of-compensation
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Most companies give cash bonuses when the stock tanks. I remember Microsoft doing this and I think I read recently Amazon was doing it too, or at least adjusting the mix of stock vs cash compensation.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Microsoft has not done this recently.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      It happened under the Balmer years a few times.
  - mabbo 4y ago
    Amazon never did this. They gave some extra stocks.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Shopify’s system drastically limits the upside which is unattractive
  - 4y ago
dougmwne 4y ago
I was extremely bullish on Meta’s VR effort. The Quest 2 is extremely impressive and you really feel like peering into the future of computing. I’m starting to realize that it may be the far future. The $1500 Quest Pro was just released to scathing reviews. The AR color passthrough feature sounds like a low quality joke. The headset is heavier and the battery lasts a hour or 2. The screen fidelity is still too low for productivity computing. The eye and face tracking result in extremely underwhelming animation that I can’t imagine adds any value to the social proposition. The primary Meta dream of all your social interactions in VR with friends, family and coworkers around the world is starting to seem more than a decade away. And on top of all that, Apple looks like it may have a serious entrant into this market and might easily beat Meta to the finish line to the next computing platform.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Nobody but tech bros cares a whit about VR, sorry. VR is a toy, and a poor one at that.
  - ninethirty 4y ago
    I think it could be ok for conferences; if you're too lazy to go to DefCon for instance.
  - xvector 4y ago
    Yeah, and technologists don’t give a shit about what regular people think. When have they ever advanced the state of how we use technology? In 20 years they’ll be happily be using VR glasses, completely having forgotten their initial skepticism.
- duxup 4y ago
  Outside of gaming ... I don't understand who the current efforts in VR are FOR? There was an arstechnica article about Carmack giving a speech about the state of VR. Apparently he was dismissive of some controversy regarding avatar details. And was disappointed that they weren't yet at the stage where they could hold "arena-scale support with thousands of avatars milling around". Who wants that? I don't want to put on a headset to sit in the nose bleeds of some virtual world with Zuck or Carmack ... that only seems to appeal to: 1. Developers making the cool thing work. 2. The person on stage talking who gets to just put on a headset to appear before thousands of people. That's it.... who are these efforts all for?
rubyist5eva 4y ago
One can only hope there will be a great awakening of some kind and it will go to 0.
samwillis 4y ago
The online advertising party is over. It’s going to hit all advertising platforms badly. Facebook has been hit particularly hard by the iOS changes, but that’s not the cause. If Apple hadn’t made that change themselves, government regulations would have been brought in that implemented it. I also don’t believe the increase in AI is a solution to the regulations around tracking. Advertising online is increasingly a black box, you put money in one side and the algorithm sends you traffic. The control and insight that used to be there is gone. I don’t believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t (have run an e-commerce store for 10 years). I don’t want “deep tracking” and profile building. I just want manual controls and visible conversion tracking. But we are never getting that back.
- bob_theslob646 4y ago
  > believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t Why not? If ROI remains high, why would I care ?
  - creshal 4y ago
    GDPR already tightly regulates the use of AI for automated decision marking affecting consumers, and other regulators aren't too happy about the directions taken by either AI companies or advertisers. So there's a very, very big "if" on future ROI.
- PaulWaldman 4y ago
  >I don’t believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t (have run an e-commerce store for 10 years). How do you advertise your e-commerce store?
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  I think you are confused by what Apple did with ATT. Apple did not do anything to really prevent "deep tracking" and profile building. In fact, the single primary casualty of their changes is the exact thing that you say you do want: visible conversion tracking.
- 4y ago
Thaxll 4y ago
As much as I don't like Facebook I'm glad there is a large corp with a lot of money investing in VR. They're the only one really trying something.
- dkarras 4y ago
  Yeah I definitely do not want a VR winter. Meta uncoupling Facebook from the VR devices was a good move. IMO Oculus should have stayed Oculus under Meta's umbrella and have done its thing. When it went blatantly under Meta and proudly displayed its branding, it pushed VR / AR skeptics further away. Oculus had a fantastic origin story / brand and they stupidly killed it just like that. With the tech's current iteration though, it is not there for social / business. They are far too uncomfortable for such use. Make it almost as inconvenient as my glasses and people won't be able to live without it, a transformation just like smartphones did in our lives. I need to be able to comfortably put it on and get going. People will be using AR everyday through always on spectacles one day. VR for gaming and experiences is AMAZING. But very expensive. When I went from standalone Quest 2 experiences to PCVR experiences, the gap was HUGE. I can't go back to mobile graphics / experiences. Anyways, I doubt people putting on bulky VR glasses (even the new Quest Pro is way too bulky and uncomfortable, not even close) to work / be social will not be a reality anytime soon. VR gaming is still kind of niche and is not a big enough market to justify that amount of R&D costs. So something has to give. Would be very bummed about a VR winter.
swarnie 4y ago
$102 dollars to go. Sorry if you work at this place and can mentally handle making the world a worse place but it needs to die.
martythemaniak 4y ago
It's called "The Innovator's Dilemma" and not "The Innovator's Win-Win Situation" for a reason. You don't know what the future holds, so while you're making the decision both options look bad. Continue chugging on their FaceInstaApp stuff and they'll eventually stagnate and get taken over by SuperIMessage. Go all-in on a risky new path and there's no guarantee that it'll work. Anyway, I get it. People hate Zuckerberg, they hate facebook, they wanna see the whole thing burn down. But then what, will that magically get rid of social media? Or will TikTok just take over?
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I think a lot of people here would be happy with TikTok taking over just like the same people here were happy with FB back in the day. Give it a few years and the roiling cesspool below the surface of dancing and singing will burst forth and the same crowd will be calling for TikTok's demise and will be on to the next thing (also bad).
intrasight 4y ago
I am still long Meta, as I am long VR and the metaverse. While there's no guarantee that Meta will win this race, they are making the investments needed to try.
Nextgrid 4y ago
A lot of people blame Meta's VR attempt, but I don't think that's the problem. The problem in my opinion is that we have reached peak advertising. Advertising is ultimately a doomed business model as it works against your users' interests, yet requires those users to willingly use the product and engage with the ads. Over time, users learn to ignore it (see "banner blindness") so a short-term response is just to include more ads to compensate, but there's only so much space before the entire product becomes saturated with ads and users leave completely because the inconvenience of advertising became greater than the value the product provides. Regulators are also wisening up to it with stronger privacy protections (that threaten non-consensual ad-targeting) all around the world. Advertising is a time bomb and an unsustainable business model. It provides short-term revenue (and a lot of it if you play your cards right, as Meta's stock price until now reflects) but will never be sustainable in the long run. Advertising is a parasite and its host will always try to get rid of it - a pretty terrible business model when you can instead align the incentives by charging your users money and provide them a valuable service in exchange. Is there value in Facebook's products (whether current, or future VR-based ones)? Yes. Is there enough value to justify a overinflated stock price that only got there due to a combination of monopoly position as well as temporary gap in regulation against spyware? Doubt it, and so does the market.
- datadata 4y ago
  The game theory of firms choosing to advertise seems to be prisoner's dilemma like. The only equilibrium is for both firms to advertise at a loss. If either firm stops advertising, the other firm's ads become more effective and it will steal market share. As a consequence of this, I think advertising will always persist irrationally unless the system if changed to prevent this irrational behavior. A really high tax on any ad spend would probably work.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    That's not what "at a loss" means and is also not irrational. High tax on ad spend would be a throwback to our Christian moralist days where we decide that some spending is good spending that we like and other is bad spending. Most attempts to ban payment for boosting speech have failed, see citizens united.
evnix 4y ago
As someone working for one of their could be competitors in the VR domain, we are doing extremely well with a long list of customers, the end users don't see it, but VR is heavily used in medical training, military training, virtual classrooms etc. We have a good number of customers using it to show house/building plans too. Enterprise users seem to be more interested as the devices have almost become affordable and portable. Sub 400$ devices would be needed to break into mass consumer market.
kingkawn 4y ago
Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out, mark
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
VR isn't going to be a commercially successful product for Enterprise customers. I don't see how a company with 10k employees is going to think purchasing specialized hardware, software and training for a collaboration tool is going to help their business outcomes. There is a point of "good enough" for collaboration/meeting tools and features above and beyond aren't going to materially make the outcome of the collaboration/meeting any better to offset the costs.
outside1234 4y ago
The problem for Meta is that there are use cases for VR - but they are niche (so far): 1. Practicing dangerous or expensive operations: I think Microsoft Flight Simulator is a good example of this but I'm sure there are industry applications that are similar. VR allows you to practice these without crashing the literal plane. 2. Replacing things that are currently impossible in the real world: I think Zwift is a good example of this. It allows you to ride your bike in a fun environment when there are snow drifts outside. The problem for Meta is that none of these scenarios are in their wheelhouse or of high enough scale for them to be a business for them.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  The problem with both of those is that they create movement in the virtual world that doesn't match movement in the real world which is the prime recipe for motion sickness. Dramamine almost cures it, but also puts you to sleep. I've heard eating ginger and having a fan blowing on your face helps, but I haven't tried it yet.
samsolomon 4y ago
I was initially a skeptic of widespread adoption of VR. I'm not sure that it's going to be the next smartphone. However, if it gets more comfortable and the price point goes down, I could see it being a replacement for traditional desktop monitors. Instead of paying $1k for a 27-inch display you get as many large screens as you want. That seems probable to me. I know that sounds awfully boring and mundane, but that probably comes way before other applications. After all the original iPhone was just an iPod you could make calls with.
- automatic6131 4y ago
  >If it gets more comfortable and the price point goes down I could see it being a replacement for traditional desktop monitors This is - quite literally - decades away in terms of panel production and graphics tech. Just like you should not found (or pivot to!) American Airlines in 1919, you should not bet the house on virtual reality in 2022. envelope calculations - You need two low heat/low power OLED 8k monitors (or more? Currrent state of the art is 1600x1440 per eye - and it's nowhere near enough to read text) And the current headsets are heavy, with thick fresnel lenses and produce enough heat to make them unusable with an ambient temp above ~23C - You need a mobile graphics chip better than a 4090 - wayyy better. A 4090 can render a 4k virtual world (more than 4x easier than what I suggested above!) but it requires 450W to do so. So you need >4x the performance with less than a 20th to 50th the power budget). - And finally, at a price point of $1k. Actually this is probably the easiest part, once any of the above exists, should only take a few more years of scale and sale. This is if you want to replace the performance of a 100ish DPI 27" monitor. I believe a 2560x1440 is about ~110 DPI, which is very usable and pleasant, but much worse than the 220DPI of a Mac "retina" device (hence why I'm considering 8k per eye, honestly) Either way, the technology to make small enough OLED panel is close, but not there. Samsung could do it, given how large they've made their AMOLED phones, but it's still a big jump. The graphics technology to drive that is sooo far away it's not even a twinkle in ASML's eye. Here's your limiting factor. And then you have to package them together cheaply.
  - mherrmann 4y ago
    I tried to work on a Quest 2 with ImmersedVR for a few hours. It wasn't perfect, but also not nearly as hopeless as you make it out to be.
avrionov 4y ago
The global advertising revenue is projected to grow for the next 5 years [1]: There is too much extrapolation in this thread from the results of 1 company in 1 quarter. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236943/global-advertising-spending/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/236943/global-advertisin...
- fmajid 4y ago
  Facebook’s toxic reputation is catching up with it and the user base is shrinking, specially in the Western world where most of the valuable (to advertisers) customers are. Also TikTok is eating their lunch with younger generations. A company slowly sliding towards MySpace-like irrelevance, with an authoritarian CEO who has a majority of voting rights, is not an attractive investment. VR is a hail-Mary pass, and pretty much the only thing that can save the company.
0x445442 4y ago
Mention of the current decline of tech stocks without mentioning Fed policies since 2000 is missing a foundational component in what’s happening. Meta has a viable business but they have also been the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of mal-investment, that party is ending.
bena 4y ago
Tactile feedback. That's the only problem VR should be looking into. If you want to go from novelty to useful, you need genuine full body tactile feedback. It needs to feel like I performed the action I'm pantomiming. Other devices have both an input buffer and a visual buffer. Be it a controller, keyboard, mouse, etc. So I don't need to feel the weight of an item I'm holding, I just need to feel the response of the button I pressed to do so. Plus, what I'm doing is happening to an avatar on the screen. So I'm disconnected. However, in VR, there are fewer buffers. I'm now the avatar. So when I pick up an item, I expect to feel that weight. If I make a throwing motion, I expect it to feel different if I'm throwing a baseball as opposed to a basketball. But in VR, it all feels the same. Beat Saber works because the game works within the confines of VR's limitations.
- grumbel 4y ago
  On the contrary, I think focusing so much on emulating the real world is one of the core problem with modern VR, as the more you emulate reality, the more you are locked into the constraints that reality provides. Simple acts like picking up an object from the ground become a chore when you have to do them realistically. Just pointing with a laser pointer and having the ability to interact with distant objects gives a much better experience. What VR is still missing is a well defined set of gestures, tools and UI elements to perform actions in the virtual space that go beyond what your body can do. There are only a few common ones, like snap-turn, teleport-locomotion or the laser-pointer, but even those have to be reinvent each time, which leads to a lot of inconsistency. That's not to say that haptics wouldn't be nice to have, but that technology is very far from being practical for mass market VR.
smm11 4y ago
Once everyone who wanted a CB radio got a CB radio, the radios stopped selling.
Nokinside 4y ago
Reasons why Meta has no future: 1. Multiple share classes. Meta (or Alphabet) would be blocked from joining SP500 with current rules. 2. Horrible corporate governance. Leadership without accountability. Mr. Zuck can't be ousted. Meta is his personal toy. 3. Meta business is peaking. Growth by acquisitions is blocked by new regulatory environment.
derwiki 4y ago
Out of curiosity, why was the title altered from the 23% I submitted to 20%?
adam_arthur 4y ago
The Metaverse may very well be the future, but Meta has just gone far too aggressively in pursuit, far too early. There were tons of web startups with potentially viable business models in the 90s too, but they weren't actually possible to run profitably until much later. When the web was faster, when storage was cheaper, when logistics could be outsourced etc There's a clear hardware limitation in regards to pixel density, compute etc, that is going to leave VR as a niche for a long time. Semi-manufacturing process/compute performance is not a limitation that is going to be overcome anytime soon, regardless of how much Meta spends. No investor wants to wait for 200B and 20yrs to possibly achieve something in the metaverse.
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  What is crazy is that you will spend so much more compute resources just to do the same exact stuff you were doing in 1995. Some developer on here once commented that they used their vr headset to run an editor. I wonder how much more power it takes to render vim in VR…
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    I think it’s a natural trend. We move to higher and higher level abstractions over time, which makes development easier but has a performance cost. The trade off is worth it for the most part. Of course if CPUs stop improving exponentially, the tradeoff calculus changes. Also the need to care about battery life has somewhat shifted thinking back towards efficiency
    - kjkjadksj 4y ago
      How can it be worth it? Does 2020 microsoft word do anything different than the one we used in 1995? Not really. Just now you need hardware thats 100x more powerful to output a .doc file. Thats waste, not a gain.
waylandsmithers 4y ago
Hm. I've been a facebook user since the beginning. My silver lining here is that the company has a history of making very unpopular decisions that end up being very profitable. Deservedly or not, people love to hate facebook, even people who use its products regularly.
ilamont 4y ago
Zuck clearly believes in his vision, but Meta is not the vessel to do it. It would be best if spins out the VR R&D operation, and devoted his energies full-time to this in a completely separate organization. If not, I predict he will grudgingly agree to a "pullback" on VR ... or will be forced to step back as Meta CEO.
jugg1es 4y ago
If I was an executive at Meta, I'd be pushing to partner with Roblox and work on developing cheap Google Cardboard style headsets that work with phones. Roblox VR with a $10 headset would be a killer app at the grassroots level.
roamerz 4y ago
They made their own bed through their election interference and the obvious bias of their “truth police“ and are now feeling the bite. I deleted my account but recently recreated it because in my area they are the best source of information and alerts during local emergencies and events. But yeah my posts are occasional sharing of meaningless content.This may be more or less of the affect than the bite apple took out of them but cumulatively they are feeling the affects.
berkeleyjunk 4y ago
This will probably continue to happen. Google/FB etc. used content that was created by others to monetize them but kept the profits away from the content creators. This resulted in a lot of original content going away (See the death spiral of the local newspapers) and getting replaced by clickbait, algorithmic content, misinformation etc. I don't think there is room for the same amount of growth going forward and this is simply the market adjusting their P/E multiple to account for the lower growth rate (FB is being hit harder because of the Meta overspending debacle).
nurettin 4y ago
They blocked many shorting attempts today. It is nice that the stock market tries to correct price drops and makes it hard to profit from sales.
misiti3780 4y ago
Does anyone else see a future of Meta without Zuck running it?

256 points by derwiki 4y ago

adamsmith143 4y ago

I only feel bad that I haven't been short Meta.

dymk 4y ago
It’s never too late to start!
deleted 4y ago
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mrtobo 4y ago
Tested a short bet yesterday. Was not disappoint.

castrodd 4y ago

It’s about damn time.

HeckaSmart 4y ago

I personally think that the AR/VR will have a big market in the future. The question really is, how far away? 5 years? 10 years? 15 years? And will Meta be one of the winners when it's all said and one? Meta is hellbent on creating a platform so they can be the iOS/App Store instead of just an app. The stock is sliding because we're entering/in a phase where raising money is hard and cash is king. Companies are trying to pull back on investments and bets that might or might not pay off. Meta just told Wallstreet that it doesn't plan to pull back on Metaverse spending in 2023.

adamsmith143 4y ago
The problem for Meta is that it's almost certainly not going to look like what they're selling with their Metaverse which is some kind of Second Life knockoff. They went all in on a failed plan.
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  Well if all the end up with is the best hardware that's definitely going to be worth something. But what they really want is the app that people spend all their time on.
  - HeckaSmart 4y ago
    What they really want is to be the iOS and the App Store. They don't want to live under Apple and Google's roofs anymore. They want control. And they want to be the one taxing apps 30% instead of Apple and Google.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Maybe, they do have their own store for VR apps but they also allow you to connect the headset to a gaming PC and use Steam games. They also support OpenXR. So they don't seem to be building a walled garden, more like a garden with a fence you can step over. Maybe that'll change in the future but if it does they'll piss off a lot of their customers and force them to switch to other hardware.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I think Valve will get the best hw award. They've been consistently the best since the beginning
    - HeckaSmart 4y ago
      I think Apple will come out with the best hardware. Why? 1. Best mobile SoC designs by far. Not even close. 2. Hardware company at heart. Their culture is built for hardware. 3. Way more supply chain and mass manufacturing experience which means cheaper manufacturing. 4. Hardware designed for iPhone, iPad, Mac can be reused for VR/AR which means lower costs and more economy of scale. IE. M2 is used on both iPad and Macs. M2 cores are derived from A15 from iPhone 13.
    - bwb 4y ago
      My guess is Valve is bought by Apple at some point.
cube00 4y ago
I still can't see how anyone would want to wear a headset for 8 hours a day to do their job like their promo videos show. Especially an office based job where their promotional videos show someone working with "large virtual screens" in an "ideal workspace setup". Surely most users would prefer actual screens and work without the headset on all day. Maybe the next hot thing is actually bigger and cheaper screens, not VR headsets.
- HeckaSmart 4y ago
  I don't. I don't even own a VR headset. I tried the Quest Go or whatever it was called back in 2018. It was awful. I returned it immediately. But I can see GenZ or the generation after GenZ embrace VR/AR. It doesn't have to be wearing a headset. It could be glasses when you're not wearing VR. It could be your phone when you're not wearing VR.
- drcongo 4y ago
  I still can't picture how anyone is supposed to get any actual work done when they've got that thing on.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  I would only want a headset that could give me experiences I couldn't get anywhere else. Being trapped in a box and working sounds like prison.
  - cube00 4y ago
    A prison with sponsored skins for your virtual keyboard and mouse.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    No one's proposing that, Meta was even showing off custom home environments for the Quest Pro https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-pro-exclusive-home-environment-looks-magnificent/ https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-pro-exclusive-home-envi... and you can use it for any other VR experience that you want.
ren_engineer 4y ago
they should focus on the B2B use cases, the Metaverse is cringeworthy but the virtual desktop stuff I've seen actually makes me consider buying. They just need to show the ROI vs buying multiple monitors, maybe put out some studies showing their VR meetings are more effective than Zoom, show the productivity boost of being able to use VR to tune out distractions in open offices. Get enterprise customers to buy fleets of VR for their employees and then launch some sort of SaaS marketplace for Meta devices and take a cut. Facebook now has their app platform they've wanted Zuck's focus on social is what's ruining it, plus just the optics of him. He needs to disappear for awhile
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Watch the Quest Pro launch, it's very obviously B2B and pretty much exactly what you're describing sales wise.
- grumbel 4y ago
  The virtual monitors stuff looks pretty in tiny Internet videos, but doesn't hold up on the actual headset. The resolution of both of the display and passthrough cameras is still abysmal, barely better than Quest2 and a tiny fraction of a real monitor. You can compensate a bit by making the virtual monitors much bigger than a real one, but even that only goes so far. At the end of the day, it's about the same experience as putting a big old 720p TV on your desk. Resolution aside, going with virtual monitors also just shows how primitive the whole thing still is. From a 'workspace in VR' I would expect to get actual window management and UI elements in full 3D space, not just my 2D monitor projected to a virtual rectangle. Microsoft's WMR Portal had that five years ago (not without faults), Meta's attempt feels quite primitive and basic in comparison.
a4isms 4y ago
I agree with you. This very much reminds me of Apple's Newton. It was actually quite amazing given the technical constraints imposed on making something to be shipped in volume, but not only was it underpowered for what it tried to be, the "killer app" for mobile devices would turn out to be wireless internet connectivity, and the world simply wasn't ready for that yet. Apple started Newton development in 1987, killed it in 1997 when Jobs returned, and launched iPhone in 2007, arguably the biggest consumer product hit in history. I'm rooting for Meta's demise, but history shows that it's quite possible for a company to try something, fail spectacularly, but come back and get it right when the universe catches up to the ambition. Then again, Palm launched their first device in 1996, and had a big hit. But by the end of 2011, they were done. There are no guarantees that the company creating a market will be the one to profit from it.
colinmhayes 4y ago
Meta's problem is that mark just told wall st. to fuck off. Every investor is screaming to lower costs and he's raising them. It's not next years profit that investors are scared about, it's their lack of control over mark. This earnings report would mean Mark is fired even if he controlled 40% of the votes, it was that reckless.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >But really it's not next years profit that investors are scared about, it's their lack of control over mark. Yeah, when things were booming no one cared about their class C shares that left control of these massive corporations in few hands. STONKS! I sense that will change.
nstart 4y ago
To me the issue is that Meta is pushing to attack three challenges at once. On one hand there’s the hardware. Even now, people report motion sickness with the hardware. If you are trying to create a computing interaction medium of the future, these details around accessibility are going to be incredibly important. And I haven’t even mentioned battery life. So meta is working away at this very expensive challenge The second challenge is the interaction model. No one is entirely convinced yet of what interaction with computers should look like in VR. Right now it’s “mouse/touch+windows but in VR. That’s like when TV and cameras first happened and it was theater shows but on the tv screen. So Meta now has to invent or at least shepherd computing integration models and that is also incredibly expensive. And finally there is the metaverse. Technically we all live in the metaverse already. I interact with people I don’t know across forums and social media. I interact with them more than I do with some of the people I know in real life. I play games online which have meta worlds (Minecraft, temtem, and animal crossing for example). I may not have a single game of infinite worlds and meeting places but the concept of a universe within my existing world already exists and it’s served to me by the internet. But Meta wants to make it a ready player one kind of experience where I interact with it through a VR experience. That seems really forced because they are drawing a line in the ground saying that VR is how the metaverse can exist. This is also an expensive bet especially when the interaction model hasn’t been figured out yet. I don’t know where this is heading for meta but their goal of creating the next big computing and interaction platform with app stores that they control instead of apple or google is incredibly ambitious but seemingly poorly executed thus far.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  I don’t disagree with your overarching analysis, but: > And finally there is the metaverse. Technically we all live in the metaverse already. I interact with people I don’t know across forums and social media. Meta properties are already a huge share of this activity. Think FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, …
kingkawn 4y ago
When you don’t have to wear an absurd headset

pjc50 4y ago

It's amazing what spending $15bn on a metaverse that everybody immediately laughs at will do to your stock price.

tail_exchange 4y ago
I started my Oculus Quest a couple days ago after a small hiatus, and it forced me to create a Meta account and set up a Horizon profile. Looks like Zuck is pushing really hard for his Metaverse thing. Ah, yes please, I would love to be in a VRChat universe flavored with all that Facebook goodness, I can't think of a better way to use my headset.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  that's pretty much the only thing the quest is capable of running
  - tail_exchange 4y ago
    Pretty much. Though you can play anything if you have a link, which is my case. There are other alternatives like the Index, but they are way more expensive.
  - reilly3000 4y ago
    Steam VR doesn’t count? I had to do some hackiness but now it works wirelessly for me, no link cable needed.
- largepeepee 4y ago
  Forcing me to sign up with my IRL account was the no.1 reason I avoided the oculus. I don't want fb tracking me roleplaying as a catgirl or doing some other degenerate activity with my 3D avatar and "accidentally" leaking data to advertisers or worse, family and friends. With their track record, Facebook is the last company I'll trust with my data. No wonder they had no issue rebranding with such a lousy reputation.
  - 4y ago

PedroBatista 4y ago

It's been "known" Meta would report really bad results for a few days now. Also, Zuck doublespeak about that a few weeks ago with the whole thing about the need to be "more focused" or some kind of "the party is over" type of memo to his employees.

netrus 4y ago
The stock dropping 23% tells you that it's (much) worse than expected. That bad news were anticipated (and priced in) makes it even worse.
- fbn79 4y ago
  I think a so drammatic price sink came from Zuc post on Facebook prospecting even much more capex expenses for 2023. So for sure still another year of bad earnings
loeg 4y ago
If it was in any sense "known," the stock wouldn't have moved 25% in a day.
- PedroBatista 4y ago
  It was public it would be bad, but it was not public it would be this bad. However it was "known" aka a group of people "had the same dream" before today that it would be REALLY bad.

m348e912 4y ago

I've been reserving judgment on Meta's decision to go all in on virtual reality because maybe Zuck knows something we all don't. But his vision reminds me of Second Life circa 1999. I didn't care for it back then and I don't care for it now. Maybe there's something I am missing.

cube00 4y ago
The idea of giving your boss Facebook level stalking into your working day isn't as appealing as Zuck hoped.
- yakshemash 4y ago
  Not to say that Metaverse will necessarily fit the bill, but the question is whether your boss will be interested enough in getting Facebook level stalking power into their employees working day, me thinks.
  - cube00 4y ago
    Employees assess themselves as being the most productive working from home, management assess them as being the least productive. Management absolutely want in person office level control over their employees. Take a look at some of the things Microsoft Purview now tracks (and in some cases had to stop tracking due to backlash)
    - yakshemash 4y ago
      Completely agree with you. My point was that for the majority of workplaces, the choice of introducing or not such invasive tracking tech belongs to the employer. Employees sadly (at least to me) may not have much say in it if Meta puts together a convincing platform for employers.
sumtechguy 4y ago
Think sony had something similar to this in the ps3 era? Or I am remembering it wrong.

cpurdy 4y ago

Facebook and Google got hit very hard in the recent quarter, but none of the articles point out one of the obvious reasons contributing to their drops: Apple made it significantly harder to track macOS and iOS users, which people tend to be high value targets for advertisements.

cmsj 4y ago
Not sure that hurts Google anywhere near as much as it does Facebook?
colinmhayes 4y ago
This was priced in last year when facebook said it would cost them $10 billion a year. Google has next to no presence in mobile apps/non-browser ads so I dont think they care much.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >Google has next to no presence in mobile/non-browser ads so I dont think they care much. Uh... what?
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    apple's changes made it harder to use a users profile from one app to target them on another app. All of google's ads are served on a browser so they weren't affected.
    - KoftaBob 4y ago
      When you use a free app that shows you ads, whose ad network do you think is serving those ads?
      - colinmhayes 4y ago
        facebook's...

endisneigh 4y ago

Apple will be the one to win VR. They’ll wait until the very last possible moment. All Meta is doing is making their R&D cheaper. Google should bring back Cardboard. Even with crappy quality, people will try it out for $10.

jadbox 4y ago
Hololens may give Microsoft a headstart into entering AR/VR for businesses.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gilrain 4y ago
It certainly helps that they’re already a hardware company.
cube00 4y ago
Certainly seems that way with their entry into the advertising market. Watched and learnt from DoubleClick, Google and Facebook. Cut them off and now it's time to strike.
gonzo41 4y ago
You're right about apple. Focusing on execution rather than bleeding edge innovation has certainly been a winning strategy.
- criddell 4y ago
  I think you're right. On top of that, Apple isn't afraid to ignore the low end. Meta and Microsoft can have that market.
  - akmarinov 4y ago
    Even if they try to get the low end - they fail at it, their customers just buy the high end stuff, see iPhone 5C, iPhone Mini, iPhone Plus now - all "cheaper" and cancelled or not doing well.

aclatuts 4y ago

It is no surprise, the problem is betting on when this would happen. The Metaverse is far outside their competency. And renaming their company to Meta makes acquiring another company with a Metaverse product impossible, without being a laughing stock, unlike with the Instagram purchase.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
The thing it reminds me of most is when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball.
lifeplusplus 4y ago
Fortnite is better metaverse as far as metaverse go

Invictus0 4y ago

Lowest point since 2016, not adjusting for inflation. Damn.

compumike 4y ago
META stock chart adjusted for inflation: https://totalrealreturns.com/s/META https://totalrealreturns.com/s/META (Will include today's change only after end-of-day data is released, probably around 8pm ET / 5pm PT.) Regardless, will likely still land in the 2015-2016 time range.

mproud 4y ago

I read a quote saying managers at Facebook were struggling to get their own employees to want to have meetings on Metaverse. It’s not a good sign when the very product they’re pushing currently sucks where people don’t even want to use it.

cube00 4y ago
This is one thing Microsoft had right in the Windows NT days, dog food the product. If the devs you're paying aren't willing to use it, there's no chance the paying customers will touch it.

shubhamjain 4y ago

I don't believe that Metaverse would be a success, but I still think $META could be a good value buy at this point. Investors are forgetting that $META still has an asset that it has not realized the potential of—WhatsApp. The app has 2B monthly active users and many of them are non-tech savvy who would loath at the idea of switching to another app. There are ~500M users in India alone[1]. Can you believe that? 40%+ of the country actively using an app? The advertising potential is insane. But again, it's only speculation that the potential can be realized. I do think it doesn't hurt to have one risky bet in your portfolio. [1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/whatsapp-may-soon-touch-500-million-users-in-india-despite-new-privacy-policy-claims-report-1758344-2021-01-12 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/whatsapp-may...

robofanatic 4y ago
ads on Whatsapp?? PLEASE NO!!
itsoktocry 4y ago
>The advertising potential is insane. You realize the "just slap ads on it" monetization method is going away, right? Outside of regulation (ie GDPR) and platform control (ATT), it's 2022; do people really still believe that flooding a product people love with ads won't change user behaviour?
- foobarian 4y ago
  It may work for a year or two. That's still a year or two more of insane revenue than nothing.
AlanYx 4y ago
Meta might be a good value buy at these prices if they launched a dividend. But their free cash flow dropped close to zero in this last quarter, so that won't be happening.
- colinmhayes 4y ago

mabbo 4y ago

It's going to be an interest year or two if all tech stocks continue to fall. Most of these companies pay largely in RSUs for more senior ICs and managers. RSUs strike a price at the grant date. If you're paid 50% in stock, and the stock falls by 24%, you just took a 12% pay cut. Meanwhile, the new guy doing the same job as you got their RSUs granted at today's stock price, but the target value for someone at that job level- no pay cut for them, effectively. It's a recipe for a lot of people swapping jobs just to keep their incomes at the same level. Or, companies can do as my employer did (bias note) and switch to a new comp system that avoids these problems: https://news.shopify.com/rewriting-the-story-of-compensation https://news.shopify.com/rewriting-the-story-of-compensation

qbasic_forever 4y ago
Most companies give cash bonuses when the stock tanks. I remember Microsoft doing this and I think I read recently Amazon was doing it too, or at least adjusting the mix of stock vs cash compensation.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Microsoft has not done this recently.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    It happened under the Balmer years a few times.
- mabbo 4y ago
  Amazon never did this. They gave some extra stocks.
endisneigh 4y ago
Shopify’s system drastically limits the upside which is unattractive
- 4y ago

dougmwne 4y ago

I was extremely bullish on Meta’s VR effort. The Quest 2 is extremely impressive and you really feel like peering into the future of computing. I’m starting to realize that it may be the far future. The $1500 Quest Pro was just released to scathing reviews. The AR color passthrough feature sounds like a low quality joke. The headset is heavier and the battery lasts a hour or 2. The screen fidelity is still too low for productivity computing. The eye and face tracking result in extremely underwhelming animation that I can’t imagine adds any value to the social proposition. The primary Meta dream of all your social interactions in VR with friends, family and coworkers around the world is starting to seem more than a decade away. And on top of all that, Apple looks like it may have a serious entrant into this market and might easily beat Meta to the finish line to the next computing platform.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
Nobody but tech bros cares a whit about VR, sorry. VR is a toy, and a poor one at that.
- ninethirty 4y ago
  I think it could be ok for conferences; if you're too lazy to go to DefCon for instance.
- xvector 4y ago
  Yeah, and technologists don’t give a shit about what regular people think. When have they ever advanced the state of how we use technology? In 20 years they’ll be happily be using VR glasses, completely having forgotten their initial skepticism.
duxup 4y ago
Outside of gaming ... I don't understand who the current efforts in VR are FOR? There was an arstechnica article about Carmack giving a speech about the state of VR. Apparently he was dismissive of some controversy regarding avatar details. And was disappointed that they weren't yet at the stage where they could hold "arena-scale support with thousands of avatars milling around". Who wants that? I don't want to put on a headset to sit in the nose bleeds of some virtual world with Zuck or Carmack ... that only seems to appeal to: 1. Developers making the cool thing work. 2. The person on stage talking who gets to just put on a headset to appear before thousands of people. That's it.... who are these efforts all for?

rubyist5eva 4y ago

One can only hope there will be a great awakening of some kind and it will go to 0.

samwillis 4y ago

The online advertising party is over. It’s going to hit all advertising platforms badly. Facebook has been hit particularly hard by the iOS changes, but that’s not the cause. If Apple hadn’t made that change themselves, government regulations would have been brought in that implemented it. I also don’t believe the increase in AI is a solution to the regulations around tracking. Advertising online is increasingly a black box, you put money in one side and the algorithm sends you traffic. The control and insight that used to be there is gone. I don’t believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t (have run an e-commerce store for 10 years). I don’t want “deep tracking” and profile building. I just want manual controls and visible conversion tracking. But we are never getting that back.

bob_theslob646 4y ago
> believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t Why not? If ROI remains high, why would I care ?
- creshal 4y ago
  GDPR already tightly regulates the use of AI for automated decision marking affecting consumers, and other regulators aren't too happy about the directions taken by either AI companies or advertisers. So there's a very, very big "if" on future ROI.
PaulWaldman 4y ago
>I don’t believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t (have run an e-commerce store for 10 years). How do you advertise your e-commerce store?
whimsicalism 4y ago
I think you are confused by what Apple did with ATT. Apple did not do anything to really prevent "deep tracking" and profile building. In fact, the single primary casualty of their changes is the exact thing that you say you do want: visible conversion tracking.
4y ago

Thaxll 4y ago

As much as I don't like Facebook I'm glad there is a large corp with a lot of money investing in VR. They're the only one really trying something.

dkarras 4y ago
Yeah I definitely do not want a VR winter. Meta uncoupling Facebook from the VR devices was a good move. IMO Oculus should have stayed Oculus under Meta's umbrella and have done its thing. When it went blatantly under Meta and proudly displayed its branding, it pushed VR / AR skeptics further away. Oculus had a fantastic origin story / brand and they stupidly killed it just like that. With the tech's current iteration though, it is not there for social / business. They are far too uncomfortable for such use. Make it almost as inconvenient as my glasses and people won't be able to live without it, a transformation just like smartphones did in our lives. I need to be able to comfortably put it on and get going. People will be using AR everyday through always on spectacles one day. VR for gaming and experiences is AMAZING. But very expensive. When I went from standalone Quest 2 experiences to PCVR experiences, the gap was HUGE. I can't go back to mobile graphics / experiences. Anyways, I doubt people putting on bulky VR glasses (even the new Quest Pro is way too bulky and uncomfortable, not even close) to work / be social will not be a reality anytime soon. VR gaming is still kind of niche and is not a big enough market to justify that amount of R&D costs. So something has to give. Would be very bummed about a VR winter.

swarnie 4y ago

$102 dollars to go. Sorry if you work at this place and can mentally handle making the world a worse place but it needs to die.

martythemaniak 4y ago

It's called "The Innovator's Dilemma" and not "The Innovator's Win-Win Situation" for a reason. You don't know what the future holds, so while you're making the decision both options look bad. Continue chugging on their FaceInstaApp stuff and they'll eventually stagnate and get taken over by SuperIMessage. Go all-in on a risky new path and there's no guarantee that it'll work. Anyway, I get it. People hate Zuckerberg, they hate facebook, they wanna see the whole thing burn down. But then what, will that magically get rid of social media? Or will TikTok just take over?

throwaway4aday 4y ago
I think a lot of people here would be happy with TikTok taking over just like the same people here were happy with FB back in the day. Give it a few years and the roiling cesspool below the surface of dancing and singing will burst forth and the same crowd will be calling for TikTok's demise and will be on to the next thing (also bad).

intrasight 4y ago

I am still long Meta, as I am long VR and the metaverse. While there's no guarantee that Meta will win this race, they are making the investments needed to try.

Nextgrid 4y ago

A lot of people blame Meta's VR attempt, but I don't think that's the problem. The problem in my opinion is that we have reached peak advertising. Advertising is ultimately a doomed business model as it works against your users' interests, yet requires those users to willingly use the product and engage with the ads. Over time, users learn to ignore it (see "banner blindness") so a short-term response is just to include more ads to compensate, but there's only so much space before the entire product becomes saturated with ads and users leave completely because the inconvenience of advertising became greater than the value the product provides. Regulators are also wisening up to it with stronger privacy protections (that threaten non-consensual ad-targeting) all around the world. Advertising is a time bomb and an unsustainable business model. It provides short-term revenue (and a lot of it if you play your cards right, as Meta's stock price until now reflects) but will never be sustainable in the long run. Advertising is a parasite and its host will always try to get rid of it - a pretty terrible business model when you can instead align the incentives by charging your users money and provide them a valuable service in exchange. Is there value in Facebook's products (whether current, or future VR-based ones)? Yes. Is there enough value to justify a overinflated stock price that only got there due to a combination of monopoly position as well as temporary gap in regulation against spyware? Doubt it, and so does the market.

datadata 4y ago
The game theory of firms choosing to advertise seems to be prisoner's dilemma like. The only equilibrium is for both firms to advertise at a loss. If either firm stops advertising, the other firm's ads become more effective and it will steal market share. As a consequence of this, I think advertising will always persist irrationally unless the system if changed to prevent this irrational behavior. A really high tax on any ad spend would probably work.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  That's not what "at a loss" means and is also not irrational. High tax on ad spend would be a throwback to our Christian moralist days where we decide that some spending is good spending that we like and other is bad spending. Most attempts to ban payment for boosting speech have failed, see citizens united.

evnix 4y ago

As someone working for one of their could be competitors in the VR domain, we are doing extremely well with a long list of customers, the end users don't see it, but VR is heavily used in medical training, military training, virtual classrooms etc. We have a good number of customers using it to show house/building plans too. Enterprise users seem to be more interested as the devices have almost become affordable and portable. Sub 400$ devices would be needed to break into mass consumer market.

kingkawn 4y ago

Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out, mark

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

VR isn't going to be a commercially successful product for Enterprise customers. I don't see how a company with 10k employees is going to think purchasing specialized hardware, software and training for a collaboration tool is going to help their business outcomes. There is a point of "good enough" for collaboration/meeting tools and features above and beyond aren't going to materially make the outcome of the collaboration/meeting any better to offset the costs.

outside1234 4y ago

The problem for Meta is that there are use cases for VR - but they are niche (so far): 1. Practicing dangerous or expensive operations: I think Microsoft Flight Simulator is a good example of this but I'm sure there are industry applications that are similar. VR allows you to practice these without crashing the literal plane. 2. Replacing things that are currently impossible in the real world: I think Zwift is a good example of this. It allows you to ride your bike in a fun environment when there are snow drifts outside. The problem for Meta is that none of these scenarios are in their wheelhouse or of high enough scale for them to be a business for them.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
The problem with both of those is that they create movement in the virtual world that doesn't match movement in the real world which is the prime recipe for motion sickness. Dramamine almost cures it, but also puts you to sleep. I've heard eating ginger and having a fan blowing on your face helps, but I haven't tried it yet.

samsolomon 4y ago

I was initially a skeptic of widespread adoption of VR. I'm not sure that it's going to be the next smartphone. However, if it gets more comfortable and the price point goes down, I could see it being a replacement for traditional desktop monitors. Instead of paying $1k for a 27-inch display you get as many large screens as you want. That seems probable to me. I know that sounds awfully boring and mundane, but that probably comes way before other applications. After all the original iPhone was just an iPod you could make calls with.

automatic6131 4y ago
>If it gets more comfortable and the price point goes down I could see it being a replacement for traditional desktop monitors This is - quite literally - decades away in terms of panel production and graphics tech. Just like you should not found (or pivot to!) American Airlines in 1919, you should not bet the house on virtual reality in 2022. envelope calculations - You need two low heat/low power OLED 8k monitors (or more? Currrent state of the art is 1600x1440 per eye - and it's nowhere near enough to read text) And the current headsets are heavy, with thick fresnel lenses and produce enough heat to make them unusable with an ambient temp above ~23C - You need a mobile graphics chip better than a 4090 - wayyy better. A 4090 can render a 4k virtual world (more than 4x easier than what I suggested above!) but it requires 450W to do so. So you need >4x the performance with less than a 20th to 50th the power budget). - And finally, at a price point of $1k. Actually this is probably the easiest part, once any of the above exists, should only take a few more years of scale and sale. This is if you want to replace the performance of a 100ish DPI 27" monitor. I believe a 2560x1440 is about ~110 DPI, which is very usable and pleasant, but much worse than the 220DPI of a Mac "retina" device (hence why I'm considering 8k per eye, honestly) Either way, the technology to make small enough OLED panel is close, but not there. Samsung could do it, given how large they've made their AMOLED phones, but it's still a big jump. The graphics technology to drive that is sooo far away it's not even a twinkle in ASML's eye. Here's your limiting factor. And then you have to package them together cheaply.
- mherrmann 4y ago
  I tried to work on a Quest 2 with ImmersedVR for a few hours. It wasn't perfect, but also not nearly as hopeless as you make it out to be.

avrionov 4y ago

The global advertising revenue is projected to grow for the next 5 years [1]: There is too much extrapolation in this thread from the results of 1 company in 1 quarter. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236943/global-advertising-spending/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/236943/global-advertisin...

fmajid 4y ago
Facebook’s toxic reputation is catching up with it and the user base is shrinking, specially in the Western world where most of the valuable (to advertisers) customers are. Also TikTok is eating their lunch with younger generations. A company slowly sliding towards MySpace-like irrelevance, with an authoritarian CEO who has a majority of voting rights, is not an attractive investment. VR is a hail-Mary pass, and pretty much the only thing that can save the company.

0x445442 4y ago

Mention of the current decline of tech stocks without mentioning Fed policies since 2000 is missing a foundational component in what’s happening. Meta has a viable business but they have also been the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of mal-investment, that party is ending.

bena 4y ago

Tactile feedback. That's the only problem VR should be looking into. If you want to go from novelty to useful, you need genuine full body tactile feedback. It needs to feel like I performed the action I'm pantomiming. Other devices have both an input buffer and a visual buffer. Be it a controller, keyboard, mouse, etc. So I don't need to feel the weight of an item I'm holding, I just need to feel the response of the button I pressed to do so. Plus, what I'm doing is happening to an avatar on the screen. So I'm disconnected. However, in VR, there are fewer buffers. I'm now the avatar. So when I pick up an item, I expect to feel that weight. If I make a throwing motion, I expect it to feel different if I'm throwing a baseball as opposed to a basketball. But in VR, it all feels the same. Beat Saber works because the game works within the confines of VR's limitations.

grumbel 4y ago
On the contrary, I think focusing so much on emulating the real world is one of the core problem with modern VR, as the more you emulate reality, the more you are locked into the constraints that reality provides. Simple acts like picking up an object from the ground become a chore when you have to do them realistically. Just pointing with a laser pointer and having the ability to interact with distant objects gives a much better experience. What VR is still missing is a well defined set of gestures, tools and UI elements to perform actions in the virtual space that go beyond what your body can do. There are only a few common ones, like snap-turn, teleport-locomotion or the laser-pointer, but even those have to be reinvent each time, which leads to a lot of inconsistency. That's not to say that haptics wouldn't be nice to have, but that technology is very far from being practical for mass market VR.

smm11 4y ago

Once everyone who wanted a CB radio got a CB radio, the radios stopped selling.

Nokinside 4y ago

Reasons why Meta has no future: 1. Multiple share classes. Meta (or Alphabet) would be blocked from joining SP500 with current rules. 2. Horrible corporate governance. Leadership without accountability. Mr. Zuck can't be ousted. Meta is his personal toy. 3. Meta business is peaking. Growth by acquisitions is blocked by new regulatory environment.

derwiki 4y ago

Out of curiosity, why was the title altered from the 23% I submitted to 20%?

adam_arthur 4y ago

The Metaverse may very well be the future, but Meta has just gone far too aggressively in pursuit, far too early. There were tons of web startups with potentially viable business models in the 90s too, but they weren't actually possible to run profitably until much later. When the web was faster, when storage was cheaper, when logistics could be outsourced etc There's a clear hardware limitation in regards to pixel density, compute etc, that is going to leave VR as a niche for a long time. Semi-manufacturing process/compute performance is not a limitation that is going to be overcome anytime soon, regardless of how much Meta spends. No investor wants to wait for 200B and 20yrs to possibly achieve something in the metaverse.

kjkjadksj 4y ago
What is crazy is that you will spend so much more compute resources just to do the same exact stuff you were doing in 1995. Some developer on here once commented that they used their vr headset to run an editor. I wonder how much more power it takes to render vim in VR…
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  I think it’s a natural trend. We move to higher and higher level abstractions over time, which makes development easier but has a performance cost. The trade off is worth it for the most part. Of course if CPUs stop improving exponentially, the tradeoff calculus changes. Also the need to care about battery life has somewhat shifted thinking back towards efficiency
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    How can it be worth it? Does 2020 microsoft word do anything different than the one we used in 1995? Not really. Just now you need hardware thats 100x more powerful to output a .doc file. Thats waste, not a gain.

waylandsmithers 4y ago

Hm. I've been a facebook user since the beginning. My silver lining here is that the company has a history of making very unpopular decisions that end up being very profitable. Deservedly or not, people love to hate facebook, even people who use its products regularly.

ilamont 4y ago

Zuck clearly believes in his vision, but Meta is not the vessel to do it. It would be best if spins out the VR R&D operation, and devoted his energies full-time to this in a completely separate organization. If not, I predict he will grudgingly agree to a "pullback" on VR ... or will be forced to step back as Meta CEO.

jugg1es 4y ago

If I was an executive at Meta, I'd be pushing to partner with Roblox and work on developing cheap Google Cardboard style headsets that work with phones. Roblox VR with a $10 headset would be a killer app at the grassroots level.

roamerz 4y ago

They made their own bed through their election interference and the obvious bias of their “truth police“ and are now feeling the bite. I deleted my account but recently recreated it because in my area they are the best source of information and alerts during local emergencies and events. But yeah my posts are occasional sharing of meaningless content.This may be more or less of the affect than the bite apple took out of them but cumulatively they are feeling the affects.

berkeleyjunk 4y ago

This will probably continue to happen. Google/FB etc. used content that was created by others to monetize them but kept the profits away from the content creators. This resulted in a lot of original content going away (See the death spiral of the local newspapers) and getting replaced by clickbait, algorithmic content, misinformation etc. I don't think there is room for the same amount of growth going forward and this is simply the market adjusting their P/E multiple to account for the lower growth rate (FB is being hit harder because of the Meta overspending debacle).

nurettin 4y ago

They blocked many shorting attempts today. It is nice that the stock market tries to correct price drops and makes it hard to profit from sales.

misiti3780 4y ago

Does anyone else see a future of Meta without Zuck running it?