4 ms·

Its all sunshine and roses until "the meeting" in which Carmack says "I've started this awesome feature that I feel defines the future of the product and..." a

Its all sunshine and roses until "the meeting" in which Carmack says "I've started this awesome feature that I feel defines the future of the product and..." a hand goes up and a suit says "that really doesn't fit with 'our vision' for where we want Oculus to go". Game Over.

avenger123 13y ago
Why is this a big problem? If your scenario plays out after VR is really viable because of the extra millions that Facebook puts into the product, so be it. At this point, the awesome feature issue isn't even really on the table based on my understanding. Getting the technology to be stable and solving all the issues with it is the main focus. I don't see Facebook getting in the way of that. If that does become an issue, Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going.
- amirmc 13y ago
  "Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going." This is true. That's exactly why people find it sad.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Would they also be sad if Occulus never pulled it off due to financial constraints?
- noonespecial 13y ago
  My fear is that Carmack will know how to make VR really viable but will be prevented from doing this by his new short-sighted managers. If this happens even a tiny bit, it will kill the passion in the entire team and Facebook's VR will become a gimmick more like Cue-Cat than a world-changing new platform.
  - mst 13y ago
    Or Carmack and Abrash will say "fuck it" and find an organisation (Valve perhaps :) that won't prevent them. The technical minds should have a fair chunk of leverage here simply because of how much of the capacity to evolve the product in truly exciting ways will reside in their head.
    - pekk 13y ago
      > Or Carmack and Abrash will say "fuck it" and find an organisation (Valve perhaps :) that won't prevent them. When Facebook owns all the IP? Don't be silly.
    - sseveran 13y ago
      Abrash just left Valve.
jfoster 13y ago
Your comment assumes that Zuckerberg and the people at Facebook will be incompetent at nurturing an employee like John Carmack and the other talented Oculus VR folk. If they're smart, they will allow him pretty much free reign, and then put some resources behind his projects to help them mature. (think Sergey Brin or Andy Rubin at Google)
- grey-area 13y ago
  No, it just assumes that the interests of a large corporation which is entering the phase where it needs to show revenue growth every quarter and satisfy shareholders are not aligned with those of a small company attempting to build an experimental product in a completely new field. This is an old story and the outcome is almost always the same (large corp buys small corp, promises to change nothing and stay hands off, circumstances change, large corp looks for projects to downsize or cut). Google has many examples of acquisitions, how many are running in a hands off way now? On top of that, Facebook has shown itself to be untrustworthy many times from a dev and user perspective (beacon, FB credits etc), so if Carmack wants to avoid that and produce something without intrusive advertising for example, they may well clash. None of this means it was a bad idea to sell for oculus, just that selling is ceding control completely to the vision of the larger company in the long term.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Facebook does not need to satisfy any shareholder except one. I mean, hacker news likes to freak out about fiduciary duty and "omg, corporations are obligated to make maximum profit." But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.), and there is near-zero legal possibility of minority investors forcing them to. This is because investors have almost no say unless it is obvious you are trying to screw them -- normally a subset of them -- or unless there is no plausible way a course of action could make money.
    - grey-area 13y ago
      I've always thought the fiduciary duty argument was silly (and I'm not HN :), so I agree with you there, but that doesn't change the broader point - when you sell a company, it is no longer yours, and the interests and politics of a large corp with public shareholders and revenue targets are not those of a smaller acquisition.
nnq 13y ago
You kind of forget who you're talking about. One doesn't just say that to John Carmack :) For a team of new-comers, without both real engineering experience and real business experience, maybe the consequences of the Facebook acquisition could have went the way you imagine, but lots of the Oculus guys are heavyweights and when someone says something that goes against their vision they need to have solid arguments, and even if their arguments will be right, they need to consider that even throwing those arguments at them comes with a huge real risk (of having a team fracture and a bunch of very smart guys leaving the company) and huge real cost (the real productivity decrease that comes from pushing a team in a direction they don't want to go to, and of wasting the big-brains' time in meetings and arguments instead of product development - these kinds of "productivity penalties" ca very well allow a competitor to come up with a better idea before them!).
grannyg00se 13y ago
I find that very difficult to imagine. JC isn't some mid level manager with a pet project in mind. He's one of the founding technical leads in the company FB just acquired. He has high political capital as well as personal financial independence. A close minded brush off like that would be likely to get that suit fired.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  It'd be easy to believe that, because it is reassuring in a way that calms anxieties about the future of Oculus. But you only have to look back to Doom 3 to see the cracks in that idea. Many design decisions of that game were unpopular when it was released, and over the following years it came out that those decisions were driven by technical aspects of the engine. Where rather than the engine sacrificing for the design, design sacrificed for the engine. So it'd be easy to make the less immediately appealing argument that they should push back on Carmack's vision when they think it's gone off the rails.
  - dvogel 13y ago
    links? As I remember it, most of the issues were around the fixed frame rates that were an attempt to unify PC development with console development. Perhaps I am confusing Doom 3 for another game though.
    - forgottenpass 13y ago
      The poster child is the flashlight, sounds stupid now but I remember how much shit it stirred back then. The rest I don't remember off the top of my head, and don't feel like scrubbing through days and days of Bombcast to find. "Carmack has also admitted that the flashlight was not attached to the weapons in the original version of Doom 3 due to performance issues" ... http://www.dsogaming.com/news/john-carmack-speaks-30fps-on-consoles-60fps-on-the-pc-doom-3-levels-more-taxing-than-rage/ http://www.dsogaming.com/news/john-carmack-speaks-30fps-on-c...
- johnbm 13y ago
  Is that why the suits kept him in the dark and sent him to talk to zuckerberg one week before the acquisition under false pretenses?
entendre 13y ago
exactly. a business built around the oculus product would, by definition not some vague promises, be precluded from canibalizing it for profit. they might let it languish or fail, but the worst we would be left with is an unpolished turd. by artificially propping up the product and guaranteeing capital for market penetration you guarantee facebook will make their money back. no. matter. what. they. have. to. do. then we're stuck with a turd with market penetration

avenger123 13y ago

Why is this a big problem? If your scenario plays out after VR is really viable because of the extra millions that Facebook puts into the product, so be it. At this point, the awesome feature issue isn't even really on the table based on my understanding. Getting the technology to be stable and solving all the issues with it is the main focus. I don't see Facebook getting in the way of that. If that does become an issue, Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going.

amirmc 13y ago
"Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going." This is true. That's exactly why people find it sad.
- girvo 13y ago
  Would they also be sad if Occulus never pulled it off due to financial constraints?
noonespecial 13y ago
My fear is that Carmack will know how to make VR really viable but will be prevented from doing this by his new short-sighted managers. If this happens even a tiny bit, it will kill the passion in the entire team and Facebook's VR will become a gimmick more like Cue-Cat than a world-changing new platform.
- mst 13y ago
  Or Carmack and Abrash will say "fuck it" and find an organisation (Valve perhaps :) that won't prevent them. The technical minds should have a fair chunk of leverage here simply because of how much of the capacity to evolve the product in truly exciting ways will reside in their head.
  - pekk 13y ago
    > Or Carmack and Abrash will say "fuck it" and find an organisation (Valve perhaps :) that won't prevent them. When Facebook owns all the IP? Don't be silly.
  - sseveran 13y ago
    Abrash just left Valve.

jfoster 13y ago

Your comment assumes that Zuckerberg and the people at Facebook will be incompetent at nurturing an employee like John Carmack and the other talented Oculus VR folk. If they're smart, they will allow him pretty much free reign, and then put some resources behind his projects to help them mature. (think Sergey Brin or Andy Rubin at Google)

grey-area 13y ago
No, it just assumes that the interests of a large corporation which is entering the phase where it needs to show revenue growth every quarter and satisfy shareholders are not aligned with those of a small company attempting to build an experimental product in a completely new field. This is an old story and the outcome is almost always the same (large corp buys small corp, promises to change nothing and stay hands off, circumstances change, large corp looks for projects to downsize or cut). Google has many examples of acquisitions, how many are running in a hands off way now? On top of that, Facebook has shown itself to be untrustworthy many times from a dev and user perspective (beacon, FB credits etc), so if Carmack wants to avoid that and produce something without intrusive advertising for example, they may well clash. None of this means it was a bad idea to sell for oculus, just that selling is ceding control completely to the vision of the larger company in the long term.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Facebook does not need to satisfy any shareholder except one. I mean, hacker news likes to freak out about fiduciary duty and "omg, corporations are obligated to make maximum profit." But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.), and there is near-zero legal possibility of minority investors forcing them to. This is because investors have almost no say unless it is obvious you are trying to screw them -- normally a subset of them -- or unless there is no plausible way a course of action could make money.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    I've always thought the fiduciary duty argument was silly (and I'm not HN :), so I agree with you there, but that doesn't change the broader point - when you sell a company, it is no longer yours, and the interests and politics of a large corp with public shareholders and revenue targets are not those of a smaller acquisition.

nnq 13y ago

You kind of forget who you're talking about. One doesn't just say that to John Carmack :) For a team of new-comers, without both real engineering experience and real business experience, maybe the consequences of the Facebook acquisition could have went the way you imagine, but lots of the Oculus guys are heavyweights and when someone says something that goes against their vision they need to have solid arguments, and even if their arguments will be right, they need to consider that even throwing those arguments at them comes with a huge real risk (of having a team fracture and a bunch of very smart guys leaving the company) and huge real cost (the real productivity decrease that comes from pushing a team in a direction they don't want to go to, and of wasting the big-brains' time in meetings and arguments instead of product development - these kinds of "productivity penalties" ca very well allow a competitor to come up with a better idea before them!).

grannyg00se 13y ago

I find that very difficult to imagine. JC isn't some mid level manager with a pet project in mind. He's one of the founding technical leads in the company FB just acquired. He has high political capital as well as personal financial independence. A close minded brush off like that would be likely to get that suit fired.

forgottenpass 13y ago
It'd be easy to believe that, because it is reassuring in a way that calms anxieties about the future of Oculus. But you only have to look back to Doom 3 to see the cracks in that idea. Many design decisions of that game were unpopular when it was released, and over the following years it came out that those decisions were driven by technical aspects of the engine. Where rather than the engine sacrificing for the design, design sacrificed for the engine. So it'd be easy to make the less immediately appealing argument that they should push back on Carmack's vision when they think it's gone off the rails.
- dvogel 13y ago
  links? As I remember it, most of the issues were around the fixed frame rates that were an attempt to unify PC development with console development. Perhaps I am confusing Doom 3 for another game though.
  - forgottenpass 13y ago
    The poster child is the flashlight, sounds stupid now but I remember how much shit it stirred back then. The rest I don't remember off the top of my head, and don't feel like scrubbing through days and days of Bombcast to find. "Carmack has also admitted that the flashlight was not attached to the weapons in the original version of Doom 3 due to performance issues" ... http://www.dsogaming.com/news/john-carmack-speaks-30fps-on-consoles-60fps-on-the-pc-doom-3-levels-more-taxing-than-rage/ http://www.dsogaming.com/news/john-carmack-speaks-30fps-on-c...
johnbm 13y ago
Is that why the suits kept him in the dark and sent him to talk to zuckerberg one week before the acquisition under false pretenses?

entendre 13y ago

exactly. a business built around the oculus product would, by definition not some vague promises, be precluded from canibalizing it for profit. they might let it languish or fail, but the worst we would be left with is an unpolished turd. by artificially propping up the product and guaranteeing capital for market penetration you guarantee facebook will make their money back. no. matter. what. they. have. to. do. then we're stuck with a turd with market penetration