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One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves.
by nstart 3y ago
One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves.
If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach houses, coffee shops or wherever they physically were. Every meeting would have been held in the metaverse. Every all-hands, in the metaverse. Every employee in charge of people would have been working with the product and engineering to create experiences for the team to bond and share time in within the Metaverse. Meta should have lived and breathed as a company within the metaverse. Pre layoffs that would have been more than 86,000 concurrent users who would have a daily direct impact on the product.
Instead, Mark wanted people to come back to the office.
The Metaverse by Meta died when their people touted it as the future of work and play but then did absolutely nothing to use it that way themselves.
- geek_at 3y agoThis seems to be a common thing in "disruptive technology". The companies see it like "OMG we build this amazing environment, we can't wait for you to use it" but company policies see little to no value in actually adopting it themselves. Sometimes this works if some niche will adopt it and let the system grow with them but it's very rare
- josephg 3y agoYeah. There’s a story I heard from the launch of Zelda: Breath of the wild (the last one). After what I assume was a flurry of work and crazy deadlines, they sent everyone on the development team home for 2 weeks to rest, and maybe just enjoy playing the game they had made with their family before it launched. After coming back in to the office, needless to say everyone had little things they personally wanted to tidy up or fix before the launch. So they did. This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. If your game is amazing, why isn’t your team taking the time to enjoy playing it?
- jheriko 3y agosome game developers do want to do this. i've gone out of my way in the past, even as a junior, to make efforts in offices to encourage developers to play their own game, and preferably with audio on and for more than 2 seconds at a time... and on the target platform instead of your turbocharged dev pc. this can be as simple as a high score competition (imagine making a game with scoring mechanisms and no leaderboards, yes thats you Codemasters!) i am still absolutely dumbfounded when i meet devs who do not play their own games, let alone play them thoroughly. modern game development is mostly pretty brain dead, and nintendo and their first party studios tend to be exceptional, some of the very best out there.
- Nemrod67 3y agoI worked in a medium-sized Racing Games studio, and we were only 5 players out of 100. When I asked for testing time and space with the team, management shut me down. It's like selling a good product is secondary XD
- JohnFen 3y ago> This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. There was a day when this sort of thing was pretty common. Close to standard practice.
- jfengel 3y agoThe answer to your question, I'm afraid, is "time". Zelda was heavily pre-ordered, and they had a deadline to hit. The fact that they could take two weeks off and still hit the window is a testament to their good planning. (And the fact that they had already announced a delay a year earlier.) But software is notoriously hard to plan, and a lot of things could easily have turned that two week time off into two weeks of 100-hour crunch time. It sounds as if they planned a generous schedule, which is another great thing. Triple-A game studios are notorious for doing the Silicon Valley thing: make optimistic announcements and insist that everybody work unpaid overtime to make it happen. Artists, QA, and other "little people" often take the brunt of the hit there, and sure don't get rich off of it. Taking the time to develop a product well, without killing your team, seems anathema to a lot of CEOs.
- sgift 3y agoNot only for disruptive technologies. Or even "new" things, but the main product. I've seen far too many companies which produce something and then you look at their own processes and not only do they not use it, whatever they use is clearly inferior, but .. it's just there. And no one will pull the switch and say "okay, that's it. We now use our own things. End of story."
- Dalewyn 3y agoThere's an industry standard term for what you described: Dogfooding[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoI agree with this at least for the Reality Labs group it would have been a way to eat your own cooking. Like normal remote work, a lot depends on roles and the ratio of sync to async in your schedule. Much can be done async within a time window if you build suitable workflows. Spending the hour or two insync time as an Avatar in a 360 6DOF 3D meeting room floating out at sea with your team would have its advantages over zoom squares. I also think there are actual individual work needs that can be significantly improved by using 3D affordances but this is probably not most people's definition of anything Metaverse; it's more like applying game engine animation and realistic physics to real things we are doing now in a 2D WIMP Pancakeland.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Spending the hour or two insync time as an Avatar in a 360 6DOF 3D meeting room floating out at sea with your team would have its advantages over zoom squares. What are the advantages that would have?
- rapnie 3y agoI never had the feeling they went "all in". Just that by their announcement they were priming the market, getting startups and vendors excited and creating stuff. Then only to wait, bide their time, see what sticks, and buy some promising innovations.
- hnbad 3y agoThis is less unusual than you think. I remember talking to a Slack engineer about how poorly Slack was handling spotty/unstable connections (commonly known as "lie-fi", i.e. you have a good connection, it may even be fast, but connections to outside services will randomly fail left and right) and how frustrating it was because messages would simply time out rather than being automatically retried. He gave me a look of pure confusion as neither he nor anyone on his team were familiar with this experience as they were all "dog-fooding" Slack in the equivalent of office environments with wired high-speed connections.
- nikita2206 3y agoHow can you dogfood a product if the product itself isn’t ready for production use yet but its idea changes the fundamentals of how you work and hence develop. It would be similar to criticizing the first ever bridge builders that they don’t use their own yet under-construction bridge for constructing that bridge, and instead transport their construction materials on water.
- bastawhiz 3y agoBridge builders shouldn't be getting the public to use their under-construction bridges
- mFixman 3y agoMeta gave everyone free Oculuses and encouraged Metaverse meetings back when I worked there. Almost nobody used it because the product required a lot of setup, was downright ugly, and was completely inferior to the usual Zoom / Workplace Chat meetings in every way. The whole thing had a very top-down feeling, with directors trying to convince managers to make their teams use the Metaverse while nobody in the company really knew what the Metaverse even was. It's great that Meta was still mildly engineer-driven and didn't force employees to use it, because in that case they would have ended with a Microsoft Teams situation.
- ahzhou 3y agoIt’s incredibly hard (read: impossible) to make top-down dogfood pushes across a massive company like Meta. You have three options: 1) Create an team to internally sell it 2) Make it an ultimatum, and fire people if they don’t agree 3) Hope your marketing is good enough that you get grassroots adoption Option 1 is a waste of money - your best sales folks should be making money, not doing internal processes. Option 2 is terrible for moral and retention. Option 3 is ineffective. I’m sure Zuck would have loved to have the whole company on the metaverse if he could.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eternityforest 3y agoI think the metaverse would kill morale regardless of how it was implemented or who's idea it is. I mean, just thinking about it kills most people's morale instantly. It will be great for disabled people who can't do these things in the real world, but at the moment the tech is not good enough to complete with anything that has a real life equivalent already.