There’s no upper limit to their financial stupidity.
FaceBook largely requires an Apple iPhone, Apple computer, "Microsoft" computer, "Google" phone, or a "Google" computer to use it. At any point one of those companies could cut FaceBook off (ex. [1]).
The Metaverse was a long term goal to get people onto a device (Occulus) that Meta controlled. While I think an AR device is much more useful than VR; I'm not convinced that it's a mistake for Meta to peruse not being beholden to other platforms.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
The headsets don’t really make sense to me in the way you’re describing. Phones are omnipresent because it’s a thing you always just have on you. Headsets are large enough that it’s a conscious choice to bring it; they’re closer to a laptop than a phone.
Also, the web interface is like right there staring at them. Any device with a browser can access Facebook like that. Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t mess with that much without causing a huge scene and probably massive antitrust backlash.
It's kind of like Microsoft with copilot - the idea about having an AI assistant that can help you use the computer is great. But it can't be from Microsoft because people don't trust them with that.
I think VR has more niche uses than the craze implied. It’s got some cool games, virtual screens for a desktop could be cool someday, but I don’t see a near future where they replace phones.
Until VR is done via glasses or some wire you stick in your neck matrix style, it will never take off
They address the friction of use issue being discussed, they’re even more discrete and available than a phone. And they are getting a lot of general public recognition, albeit not for the best reasons (people discretely filming, for genuine social media reactions but also for other reasons..).
Their tech is improving at a decent pace and they’ve recently put out a product that is both ready for consumer (at least with select use cases) adoption, and actually reasonably available to the public.
If you’re talking about the Meta Ray Ban glasses, I wouldn’t really call that a successor. There’s no AR or VR to them that I can tell; just glasses with speakers, a mic and a camera. It’s a neat product, but not a platform in the way VR was meant to be. They also have real competition. I do actually own a pair of the Bose headphone sunglasses, which are practically the same product without a camera (which I’m sure they could add if they wanted). Unless people suddenly care about the Meta AI integration, and again; Bose or someone else could add a phone companion app.
Apple was directly (and IMO arguably illegally) shutting down Facebook teams and products by playing app store chicken on refusing to allow Facebook to publish updates on a week-to-week basis. Literally would throw down and refuse unless some features were blocked. It came to a head where Zuck literally called Tim Cook during a keynote to push it through.
They also literally had reverse-engineering teams cracking open the Facebook app on a regular basis, which we discovered because of some internal methods we figured out how to invoke with some clever indirection. There was a chicken-and-egg problem and they eventually developed facilities to automatically instrument private method invocations to comprehensively defeat clever static analysis circumvention workarounds.
Also, VR hasn't failed, but it's gone silent and coasted when investing in VR growth took the backseat to investing AI. They made a couple of bad bets in VR but a lot of good ones so it was warranted, but not exactly a failure.
But thinking AR/VR was the way to go is a failure to read the room. If anything the up and coming generations seem to be recoiling from tech.
Regardless, as Microsoft found, it's too late for a 3rd platform and it seems somehow that there's only room in the world for two.
(Meta would have done better to start up a line of caffeinated sugar drinks.)
Devoid of other context, it’s hard to disagree. But your parent comment only asserted that the metaverse specifically as proposed by Facebook was an obviously stupid idea.
Patrick Boyle did a nice video a few weeks back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BaSBjxNg-M
Some of those companies can cut off invasive apps.
There is no risk of facebook.com getting blocked. And absolutely nobody is going to prefer a headset over a website for doing facebook things.
If it's actual holograms like in Star Wars? Sure, why not. Get the visual and body language cues of the rest of the room but no one has to physically congregate at a location.
But pixelated, cartoon avatars? Yeah, wtf.
Maybe they should have spent that on the facebookphone
If it was really their goal, they would have made an Android competitor. Maybe a fork like amazon did and sell phones that supported it.
Zuckerberg had one great idea (and then it wasn't really his idea) at the right time, since then he failed over and over at everything else. 'Internet for all', remember ?
I really wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe a niche product could do it, but good luck selling a laptop that won't open FB
I feel this looks like a nice thing to have given they remain the primary cloud provider. If Azure improves it's overall quality then I don't see why this ends up as a money printing press as long as OpenAI brings good models?
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-and-microsoft-tensions-ar...
And on top of that, OpenAI still has to pay Microsoft a share of their revenue made on AWS/Google/anywhere until 2030?
And Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI, period?
That's a damn good deal for Microsoft. Likely the investment that will keep Microsoft's stock relevant for years.
own 27%. but are entitled to OpenAI profits of 49% for eternity (if OpenAI is profitable or government steps in)
I doubt it
AWS's us-east-1 famously takes down either a bunch of companies with it, or causes global outages on the regular.
AWS has a terrible, terrible user interface partly because it is partitioned by service and region on purpose to decrease the "blast radius" of a failure, which is a design decision made totally pointless by having a bunch of their most critical services in one region, which also happens to be their most flaky.
But azure wins most prizes for being terrible becuase, among other things, https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize.... It's not the worst provider maybe because oracle is somehow still kicking around.
Its just a bad product. Just like windows, OneDrive, teams and basically everything Microsoft has pumped out in the past decade.
Microsoft is in the top 5 most valuable companies in the world. It's got azure that is a huge cloud provider. And yet it was utterly unable to present its answer in the AI race. Not even a bad model with a half baked harness. Nothing. And meanwhile they are trying to port NTFS to low powered FPGAs because insanity. Just let that sink in.
Or maybe you can provide a better explanation for why users had to “hunt” through hundreds(!) of product-region combinations to find that last lingering service they were getting billed $0.01 a month for?
This just doesn’t happen in GCP or Azure. You get a single pane of glass.
For all its flaws at least Azure has consistent UI.
You could argue now that that's no excuse anymore given it's one of the most valuable companies in the world, but that would dismiss the fact they have other priorities than a complete UI overhaul for consistency, and that rewrites are very dangerous, for instance people are already used to the UX pitfalls in the console, it's the devil they know, and changing that will be upsetting to the vast majority of users.
So there you have it. You know what you are getting into, AWS is a behemoth and it's 2026. Don't use the console like it's 2010. Use IaC for any nontrivial work, otherwise you only have yourself to blame.
But as a customer I absolutely hate working with AWS tech. Their stuff is a mess and I feel like I shouldn't have to get my head around their idiosyncracies. I prefer Azure even though Microsoft is a terrible company to work with. I find the AWS people and attitude a lot nicer but their services are a mess. If I do something new I prefer using Azure despite having to work with Microsoft.
Microsoft is not a "trusted partner" wanting the best for you, they're always trying to screw you over in favour of selling some new crap to your boss. Always that stupid sales drive, whereas the people from AWS are very focused on building success together. But still, their tech is just so bad unless you spend all your days working with it and really become an expert on what they offer. That's not tech, just corporate servitude. And I've always avoid that position, I don't want my career tied to some big brand name. I don't want to be "the AWS expert" or "the MS expert".
But I have to say I hate cloud (and "the world according to big tech") in general, and it's one of the reasons I'm not really involved in server infrastructure anymore these days. I'll gladly automate but not with their tooling, I prefer something more open and not tied to specific vendors. But I rarely work with that now. So yeah when that happens I'm making a one-off unicorn and figuring out all the Infra as code stuff is not worth it.
Yes, by design.
Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.
In practice, everything depends on IAM, S3, VPC, and EC2 directly or indirectly, so this doesn't help anywhere near as much as one would think.
Azure and GCP have a split control plane where there's a global register of resources, but the back-end implementations are split by team.
That way the users don't see Conway's Law manifest in the browser urls... as much. (You still do if you pay attention! In Azure the "provider type" is in the path instead of the host name.)
Hm yes but I hate working with it as a customer because it is so confusing. Everything works differently and there is a lot of overlap (several services exist that do the same thing). It seems like an amateurish patchwork.
I understand it has benefits to have different teams working on different services but those teams should still be aligned in terms of UX and basic concepts.
valued at --which I'd say is a reasonable distinction to make right about now
https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-cfo-says-annualized-...
I can easily generate double that revenue, by selling $20 bills for $10.
How?