Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.
Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:
* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.
* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.
* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.
* So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
Hnnnnnn
yup, the empire building and land grabs. yup, I had forgotten about the early days before maui was actually universal and people needed different tools to flash different devices.
So somewhat frustrating when it all started to wind down various bits of functionality disappeared a bit at a time, until finally you had something that would receive calls, but not be able to make them - and perhaps not even that any more.
(About the only downside I saw on it was the messenger vs whatsapp tussle caused a bit too much confusion).
But it was a solid bit of household tech for several years, so +1 for that!
Disclaimer: I’m friends with the founders
Many devices wipe such keys as part of unlocking the bootloader. The better ones restore access upon relocking with a stock OS but that's far from guaranteed.
Any idea what changed?
> neglect and stupidity from zuck meant that the portal was killed
Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure? Is there really no way for teams to progress projects with value somewhat independently?
sadly, or fortunately I am not at facebook anymore, so I don't have the inside track on what changed.
> Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure?
Kinda. Zuck sets direction, and he has key interests. The thing that really makes him happy is cutting edge research and new features. The thing that passes him by completely is product experience. Oculus is a great example of that. The user experience was/is trash. the time to fun is/was too high and was for a long time. Carmak spent ages saying "we can't compete on hardware specs, we can compete on ecosystem and experience" he lost that argument.
Outside of zuck there are only a few areas that actually make decisions and communicate them properly, one is monetisation/advertising and the other is Infra planning. _Everything_ else relies on people churning initiatives and seeing what sticks. With loose coordination at the centre based on who know who and who manages to convince others that "this is a Zuck priority, or related to one"
It felt very much like having a Boy king. The Boy king liked playing with toys, and if you made a toy for the king you were in favour. The boring parts were handled by "evil advisors" who are there because they don;t threaten the king's power. Everyone around the boy king is there to gain favour.
Yup - I got one for the other half as a present... like an hour and a half / two hours into setup/onboarding, they lost interest, it went back in the box and never came out again. :(
When I was there (pre-Covid) it was sort of a worst-of-all-worlds situation, compared to other firms.
On the one hand, Zuck maintains an absolute majority of voting shares, so what he say literally goes, with the board having no real authority to rein him in. If your project is something he takes a direct interest in, you are automatically subject to his whims.
On the other, Meta highly values the idea that they are a pretty flat org with no centralised command and control structure. So if your project is not under the baleful gaze of Zuck, there's a good chance that nobody in the executive suite has any fucking idea what is going on in your part of the company.
Contrast this to Bezos-era Amazon, where Bezos would sometimes directly intervene in pet projects like the FirePhone, but the entire company has a strong reporting hierarchy, and executives are expected to maintain direct command-and-control at all times over their reports (i.e. when Bezos sent one of the dreaded question-mark emails, the entire management chain damn well better be able to get their story straight top-to-bottom by the end of day)
In the middle of the night. During peak Cambridge Analytica scandal times.
I question his priorities.
Zuck and Musk are somewhat exceptional in being dictator-CEOs.
It doesn't sound that surprising, does it?
(I'm not arguing that this is right but) the typical progression of an organisation as it scales is to move away from the 'scrappy startup with a CEO-dictator' and towards something more mature. Obviously, there are reams of business literature written about growing pains and then stagnation in large companies, but the single-personality-driven model seems hugely flawed - look at Tesla, for example. And I'd certainly expect a public company of the size, resource, and maturity (in years, if not structure) of Meta to have developed beyond this point.
Honestly, that a number of people seem to not grok my questioning this, is possibly quite revealing about the monoculture of the tech world.
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[1] Companies like Meta actually has two types of ownership: ownership of the company's current assets (economic equity), which is not the same as ownership of control in the company's decision making (voting power). The owners I reference here are the second category of ownership.
In the example of Meta, a quick search suggests Zuckerberg holds about 61% of the voting power.
Are these keys not functionally leaked as soon as you ship the device to customers?
Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony ship consoles that are the target of a very motivated black market/cheating industry, and it usually takes years before any serious leaks surface.