Originally published at: "Devastated morale" at Meta after layoffs and Zuckerberg's "bad bets" | Boing Boing
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It really is sad that they tied the Oculus to Facebook. As a piece of tech, it’s REALLY impressive (especially for its price point), but I will never get one because of Zuck’s involvement.
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A competent board would hand Zuck his golden parachute for failing so spectacularly and having no visible vision for the company.
Or at least change his title and give real control to a competent leader. You’re in charge of our 10 year vision quest now!
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The board is effectively powerless in that regard. The “genius” founder and uncanny valley denizen still controls the majority of voting shares. I only hope his incompetence, demoralising austerity, and bad bets ends up taking down this toxic company.
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The whole metaverse thing seemed like a solution looking for a problem.
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Specifics: (I had forgotten about this little gem)
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I wonder if Zuck had just happened to read Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One in the early 2010s and decided that was a plausible and desirable vision of the future.
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I bet that had something to do with it. But, like, you don’t build a metropolis from the start. You build one building and as that fills you build another. And so on. (See areas in China where the opposite happened, and now you have tons of unoccupied, crumbling buildings).
Something like RP1 with the OASIS fails to show that there would have been a bunch of VR worlds and products leading up to a centralized OASIS. And the OASIS formed from the demand for VR platforms, and this one happened to be “the best”, at least in that world.
Should have started with killer app/game and loss leader prices on the Occulus Rift to rope more users into the platform, and build it from there.
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I am really at a loss to even grasp the appeal of VR of this kind.
What can I do with it that would make me want to enter these VR lands? So far nothing. Why go to a Pizza Hut that has no pizza? Or a nightclub with no drinks? No reality at all but you in your living room with a funny headset on.
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To me it just seems like a shittier Second Life. Pass.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Zuck is no “genius” in the way we think of some of these other tech “visionaries”. He just got lucky by stumbling into a good idea and doing it better and earlier than others. Other than that, there’s not a single decision he’s made indicates any kind of elite thinking… if anything the opposite.
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Not to disagree but…I wonder who is a “genius” the way these tech “visionaries” have been portrayed, if anyone. They seem awfully scarce once you look into them.
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Right now I think you are pretty spot on. Perhaps Zuckerberg needs to make friends with Musk and work on bringing the Metaverse to Elon’s Neuralink brain chip…
You may not be physically having drinks at the virtual Meta club, but at least you think you are.
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Metas problem was trying to redefine metaverse as a headset based website that was 100% controlled by meta. It was supposed to be the only metaverse and we were not supposed to have browser based, platform agnostic and headsets were optional. Mozilla and others made just that, and I believe that as a hybrid office/meeting space has a lot of potential. Wanna chat and review docs together? Click a link and no downloads, no software to install, just simply meeting.
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Anymore, tech companies can’t announce a “vision for the future” unless they’re already at the finish line. The public won’t wait, and first movers will ape your vision with horrible imitations which will sour the market.
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AR will be the direction ALL these side streets lead to - that, unlike VR, has a whole world of possibilities as an alternative interface to smartphones/tablets/PCs - and some huge technical issues (relative brightness whilst competing with Sol being the biggest)
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Well, while you are enjoying the hallucinations I hope the doctors can get the fever and infection under control. 
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You can play virtual-virtual skeeball
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Which, interestingly, was something superficially addressed at the end of Sword Art Online. The author then managed to set the stage for similar VR stories without being tied to one platform, and having to go through world building and character building over and over again.
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