The video they put out is extremely cringe. The whole “metaverse” thing is cringe.
It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men who never challenge him and only tell him what he likes to hear. He is truly detached from us normal people and our human experience.
> It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men
I feel like the opposite. Zuck is the only one to believe in the metaverse and as a result people who worked on the communication did it badly without a lot of conviction. He is in a pretty comfortable position, one of the richest people on earth doing 20% of growth every year. And still he wants to make a big risky bet like this one. I'm not really in favor of the metaverse but history has shown us that Zuck is pretty successful at things he wants to do
Zuckerberg no longer experiences risk except for in the most abstract of ways. Not in the way that the vast majority of people think about risk.
I would also suggest lack of conviction and lack of ability to complete the job look very similar, and you are likely to end up with the latter of you are surrounded by yes-men.
What things would those be? As far as I know his successes are a) 1 idea he had as a 19-year-old plus b) some other things that he bought with the money from that.
I'm not big on people complaining about "idea stealing", but zuck is in a league of his own with this shit, so worth pointing out that he didn't have the idea for FB.
Stole or just copied, the 'idea' of a social network wasn't novel by the time fb came around. Credit where it's due, it was executed well in the early stages and had the unique twist of being college-only at the beginning. People don't remember that when fb started gaining traction, friendster was already very much a thing but was stumbling hard on execution. I remember the friendster site being just dog slow. Myspace and Hi5 were also in the mix before or right at the same time as fb. Really just the PR/marketing angle and the not screwing up on execution are fb's claim to fame.
> Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Zuckerberg tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.[21][22]
Remember when he bought Instagram for a billion dollars? That amount seemed unreasonable high back then. Looking back though ... I'd wish I could spend money as well as Zuckerberg.
Was that really a risky bet paying off? It seems like the growth you'd expect from a big tech company like Facebook buying an existing, successful platform and monetizing the hell out of it.
If anything, it seems like young people ended up moving to Snapchat as their main social media platform of choice since the purchase. I had a ton of friends who used Instagram frequently but now almost no one posts there, other than occasional stories. The main feed is almost entirely ads now, and I can't remember the last time I had a conversation with someone who said they like Instagram still.
That's not to say it hasn't grown and isn't making them money, but I also don't think Instagram would have had the same trajectory if Facebook didn't buy them. They just integrated it with their existing platform that already had a lot of traffic.
Oh? Maybe give me a brief rundown of his business savvy? I'm especially interested in evidence that can't be attributed to the people he hired or the vast, vast wealth at his command. Not to mention a large PR department working hard to make him look like one of the savviest businesspeople in history.
I dislike Zuckerberg as much as another fellow, but he is one of the few founder/CEOs who managed to not only maintain control of his company, but maintain complete, uncontested control over his company. There are so few businesspeople that can claim that, as it is typical that either fundraising or corporate politics (or both) eventually ousts the founding members or dilute their absolute power. To claim that he somehow accidentally negotiated and maintained complete control throughout the entire lifetime of Facebook is disingenuous at the very least. People do not accidentally maintain power. Any number of other ambitious people would have loved to become the power broker at Facebook by taking Mark down, and preventing that every step of the way is foundational to the definition of business savvy.
But he has uncontested control because of an unusual dual-class share structure. And isn't the explanation for Facebook's founder-favoring structure basically that Peter Thiel wanted it that way?
My recollection is that founder-favoring share structures go in and out of fashion historically, and that Facebook rose during a period when that was popular. So yes, props to young Mark Zuckerberg for pushing for that when it was achievable.
But even Mark Zuckerberg describes himself as lucky in this regard:
“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/zuckerberg-if-i-didnt-have-c...
It's far too rare for a founder to maintain control in that way while also growing the company to the size of Facebook is. For example, Basecamp has managed to maintain control but it's nowhere near their size.
I'm not complaining, and I'm not claiming he is or isn't behind a given decision. I'm just trying to understand what people see as evidence of his savviness, as I don't see much besides a pile of money and an adequately-maintained natural monopoly that now looks to be in a fair bit of trouble both in the market (thus his recent announcement of a dramatic retooling) and in the public eye (e.g., the latest whistleblowers and the Congressional hearings).
And it's perfectly possible that he is more responsible for the bad choices than he is for the good ones. I've dealt with execs like that. I'd bet many others have as well.
Business savvy people hire the right people, but just because someone turned out to be the right person, doesn't mean the person who hired them was necessarily business savvy.
lol, people don't remember all of the stern talking-to's zuck had to have from his investors in the beginning. The investors made him go to business classes to learn how to 'business' and talk to people. The one thing I could give him was to retain the ownership stake that he did, but that even could be said to be largely due to sean parker's influence and his experience with VCs.
His ability to hold on to pole position once he gets it is definitely unprecedented, especially in an industry that's known for it's volatility. But in terms of original creativity, he scores extremely low.
How about building one of the largest companies in the world? Would others be able to do that if they had that idea as a 19-year-old? Let's not reduce all his accomplishments to a single idea. Ideas don't matter, execution matters.
If building Facebook isn't enough evidence of success for you, I don't know what is. Pretty sure most people with the same idea could not have turned it into what Facebook is today. Also, Facebook isn't just one idea - it's many ideas.
It's enough evidence of one success. But "Zuck is pretty successful at things he wants to do" sounds like he has more than one success. I'm just asking what those other things are.
You are exposing your lack of knowledge on what it means to run a multinational corporation. It isn't one lucky choice, it is strategy and execution over the long term. This is the same for any successful company.
In the sense of the point I'm addressing, yes. "Zuck is pretty successful at things he wants to do." Facebook is a thing he wanted to do. It was a success. (And a big one, but just because an elephant is very large for an animal means that it counts as 3 animals.) I just want to know what the other things are.
Scroll up. I didn't say Zuckerberg wasn't successful. Indeed, I've been quite clear that Facebook was one very big success.
And for what it's worth, Einstein did a lot more than one thing. Off the top of my head, Einstein's annus mirabilis had 4 papers that were all major accomplishments, including the E=mc² equation popularly associated with him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
His work on relativity came later. As did a fair bit of other work, that I'm less familiar with but that I could easily look up and provide sources for.
And that's the kind of list I'm looking for here. People have claimed that he has other successes. I'm asking what they are. I've now given you the kind of list I wanted for Einstein, and I've given it elsewhere in this discussion for Steve Jobs. So will you give me that list for Zuckerberg? Because as far as I know it has one thing on it: Facebook.
Lol...you want him to have built more than one of the most successful businesses in history? It isn't one idea that got him here.. Everyone's a critic.
Most of us would be glad to have one really big idea per lifetime. Zuck's was pretty shitty on all dimensions except moneymaking, but I'd probably still take it.
There's a concept I find really useful: Acquired Situational Narcissism. If somebody spends enough time in an environment where everything is about them, they can easily come to believe everything is about them.
Another thing I think is at play is people confusing luck with genius. Zuckerberg is clearly smart, but Facebook was also a right-time, right-place thing. As FaceMash and Facebook showed, he understood his audience because he was his audience. But now, nearly 20 years later, Zuckerberg-the-billionaire has very little in common with the audience he needs if he is going to make the metaverse happen.
I mean, I too read and like Snow Crash, so I get the emotional appeal. But a middle-aged guy's favorite dystopian novel from 30 years ago may not be a useful blueprint today.
I'm trying to word this kindly, but I think you should instead look at the concept of "Parasocial Relationships" if you think it's appropriate to diagnose Mark Zuckerberg with Acquired Situational Narcissism.
You do not know him, you have not met him and it does not make sense to try to diagnose a public figure based on what you've been presented by either his own press releases or media coverage of him. You and the person you have replied to have bought into the idea that no one at Facebook challenges him despite having not worked at Facebook or personally witnessing this.
Dude, we're all just shootin' the shit on a random tech forum site. Saying "Damn, Zuckerberg must be a total narcissist to have come up with this shit" is not exactly like I'm writing "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" in his medical chart or something.
It's more an expression that "I think this idea is so bat shitty that I don't want to know jack about how someone came up with it, just seems like a narcissistic idea to me."
Sorry, remind me where I diagnosed him? Or where I even claimed I was qualified to diagnose him?
What I said was that it's a concept I find useful. Whether a trained professional who was given the necessary access to diagnose him is beside the point. Indeed, any qualified professional who did examine and diagnose him couldn't talk about it like this, so it seems bizarre to me you have mistaken an internet forum comment for some sort of ironclad medical claim.
And I find the concept useful and relevant here because it helps make clear how the rarefied world billionaires live in can over time distort cognition whether or not it crosses the line into an actual disorder.
That's my take on it too. I don't really feel the metaverse in Snow Crash was something that I'd like to replicate. I mean, it's a cool idea, but that world is not one that I'd intentionally try to make.
Whether or not we are on our way that direction is another question entirely...
To be fair, that’s the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc.
Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whatsapp and instagram back then was a great business decision on his end.
And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense to begin with than those acquisitions did.
They were great acquisitions because Facebook failed to compete in those markets. Facebook continues to fail to compete in the youth market. I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen.
In practice what this means is that they have the same problem they did before, but antitrust scrutiny means they can't buy their way out of it this time.
>I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen.
I mean this is classic moving of goals posts - the only measure of acumen the CEO of a publically traded company is that little number called the share price. whether he buoys that number by brain-genius innovations or by brain-genius acquisitions, he's still demonstrating brain-genius business acumen (the proof of this seemingly tautological claim is that there are plenty of other companies that have failed to acquire their way out of irrelevance).
Even granting him that WhatsApp and Instagram were indeed savvy purchases, I think it is fair to say that purchasing nascent competitors is no longer a tool available to Facebook. Both because antitrust scrutiny and because those competitors likely don’t fear Facebook’s copycat routine like they once did.
New product launches have indeed gone poorly. This certainly looks terrible to my eyes. Time will tell but skepticism is warranted.
I consider this in particular deeply incorrect: "only measure of acumen the CEO of a publicly traded company is that little number called the share price". And I'm hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason Facebook is in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's focus on dominance and profit without regard to little externalities like genocide. So you may have different goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved anything.
If I'm trying to understand somebody's acumen, I want to see what they can do on their own. As someone else pointed out, Zuckerberg didn't even really have the one idea that he successfully exploited. He's rich, sure, but, "He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far from my criteria for genius.
>And I'm hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason Facebook is in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's focus on dominance and profit without regard to little externalities like genocide. So you may have different goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved anything.
you are moving goalposts you just don't see it. We're talking about business acumen, not scientific acument or mathematical acumen or ethics acumen. That FB is in the "public doghouse" is about as meaningful an observation as "the post office loses money every year" or "NASA can't afford to pay its engineers as much as FAANG" or "the ACLU has never successfully tried a personal injury case". The only public that matters here are the public markets and they think zuckerberg is a genius (this recent blip not withstanding).
>I want to see what they can do on their own.
I mean that's your definition and you're welcome to it but for the rest of the world there is M&A.
>"He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far from my criteria for genius.
to which i leave you with a quote
>Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?
>Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?
But that's exactly my point. Zuckerberg isn't starting fresh every year. That's the sort of comparison I'd love to see. He's a guy who won very big based on some lucky choices at 19. And he's never started a fresh tournament since.
In contrast, look at Steve Jobs. He's a fine example of "Once you're lucky, twice you're good." And more than twice, really. Started Apple, got pushed to the side Created the Macintosh and the LaserWriter and got booted. Helped get Pixar going. Started NeXT, which was a relative failure, but whose tech set him up nicely for an acquisition. Acquihired back at Apple and turned it into the juggernaut it is today. Say what you want about him, and I'll say plenty negative, but he clearly has skills.
That's the kind of writeup I'm looking for about Zuckerberg. That all I'm getting is bluster and "but he's very rich" is its own kind of answer, I guess.
> We're talking about business acumen
Yes, we are. But your definition is a relatively narrow one where dominance and profit are the only measures of business success. I get why that's a popular definition here. But even here, it's not the only one. If the public markets are all that matter to you, fine, but at least try to recognize their are other criteria.
>But that's exactly my point. Zuckerberg isn't starting fresh every year.
every morningl m-f, the markets open and FB starts fresh like every other ticker. every evening FB is either up or down. enough down days and zuck would be out. the fact that FB is up and to the right for almost 10 years exactly indicates that zuck wasn't just lucky.
Oh, starting with fifty billion in cash, a trillion-dollar valuation, and a monopoly on a key segment of a newly important industry is starting fresh, is it?
You aren't even trying to understand my point here, and you have reduced yours to absurdity, so I'm done.
Not that I want to compliment Zuckerberg, but "buy what you can't build", "know what you can't build", and "reasonably estimate the value of a young company" all seem like business savvy to me. Warren Buffet could be accused of simply buying his way into a huge conglomerate, but instead he's celebrated as a wise investor...
> I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen.
I guess Apple failed to compete and innovate when they acquired NeXT and Beats. Or Microsoft failed to innovate as soon as they acquired GitHub and Xamarin. /s
Very senseless acquisitions that have no long term strategy or reason behind it to sustain the future of the business or to compete in the market. /s
The reason that Apple had to buy NeXT was that they were absolutely failing internally to innovate. They tried for years to build a next-generation OS and were incapable. The acquisition was not a sign of success, but desperation.
Indeed, part of that acquisition was firing the then-current CEO. So as an example, I think it better serves to point out why we should question Zuckerberg's performance.
IG and WA were already wildly popular on a global scale when they were bought, though. People clearly wanted those. Is anyone on board with this “metaverse” thing outside of SV?
To me this seems less like the IG and WA acquisitions, and more like the much hyped Facebook Phone and Facebook Home projects (RIP).
I think it's even worse... does anyone outside of Facebook and the press take their Metaverse demos seriously?
Everyone I know and work with universally thinks they're a joke. They've spent how much money on this janky uncanny nonsense? You'd think they'd at least stumble into one redeeming quality, but it escapes them.
I think a version of the meta verse will arise eventually, but when have you ever known a major innovation to come from a tech company that is already huge in a relatively unrelated area? They just get bogged down and start eating themselves.
I don't think this is that unrelated. There are certainly plenty of examples of things about this related to a company's primary focus. There are several Amazon products that are pretty huge since they started as just "books" (Echo, Kindle, AWS), Netflix streaming after DVDs, the entire ecosystem of iOS devices after starting with Macs.
I've got a group of 6 of us that play Echo Arena on the Quest 2 about 3 hours every week. Beat saber is also a fun game, but does get a bit stale for most people after a couple weeks.
None of these are VR's Halo, but it seems that VR is getting out of the tech demo/hobbyist space and into a broader market appeal. If facebook keeps iterating and pushing out quality improvements at the current price point it's just a matter of time.
> I also don't see which generation would actually be into this.
Roblox has more than 200 million daily active users; 67% of them are under 16 [1]. Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling?
> Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling?
To college, where actual humans will be available for porking at all hours. If this Meta thing is a success, there might not be a following generation.
> the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened
Don't want to downplay it, but having access to all the info users give to FB is like insider-trading. They know very well what is trending, what is growing and what is going nowhere.
The main difference is that Metaverse is something the want to build from scratch, not something that already exists like Insta and WhatsApp, so they don't have that insider-trading info.
>To be fair, that’s the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc.
Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whatsapp and instagram back then was a great business decision on his end.
>And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense to begin with than those acquisitions did.
That's a fallacy. It doesn't matter if Zuck had 2 consecutive successful predictions because his 3rd can be unsuccessful. Each event(situation) is specific and different.
Zuck and The Book have a lot of dumb, cringeworthy, failed initiatives that have nothing to do with those surprisingly high valued acquisitions a decade ago.
Also reminds me of all the skepticism surrounding the iPhone launch. I remember those joke ad spoofs making fun of the actual phone feature. Yet here we are and who uses actual voice calls anymore?
This is what I don't understand about their plan. Who on earth is planning to adopt this? We've seen a push from all sides of the tech industry to open up the AR/VR space, and it never took off.
Remember the Snapchat Spectacles? They still sell them but I don't think they were ever popular. Google glass? Popular, but discontinued. Apple's ARKit? Definitely much less adoption than their commercials would have led you to expect.
It seems like this is an experiment bound to fail, so good luck to the execs at f̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ meta who have to clean this up in the end.
I can't speak for VR, but AR definitively has a future.
You already see practical use of this technology with HUD-tech (Heads up display) in cars, but beyond that you'll find great applications for it within medicine/operations, transportation (directions), marketing (product information, authenticity verification), and the list goes on and on...
Yes, AR has some potential as an industrial or otherwise specialized technology. It won't be revolutionary or change the world in any way, but it will probably improve several kinds of processes, a background tech.
VR is much more likely to either become the new TV or to die an obscure death, like 3D movies.
I was thinking more of TV in the way it captured audiences in the 50s, 60s, 70s. You're probably right though that AR has a bigger chance of capturing something like the way TV is interacted with today (a background activity).
>Remember the Snapchat Spectacles? They still sell them but I don't think they were ever popular. Google glass? Popular, but discontinued. Apple's ARKit? Definitely much less adoption than their commercials would have led you to expect.
This is all pretty inaccurate. Glass wasn't even a VR/AR headset. The released Spectacles were just cameras. They're releasing a new Spectacles devkit that's actually an AR headset soon. Snap filters are still very popular and ARKit is also quite popular although it hasn't really hit a killer business case.
Unifi has an AR app for working with their switches[1] that shows some HUD info for each port. I've never used it on my switches personally and judging by that video it's more trouble than it's worth. But it exists. I suppose in a large data centre this might be useful, but the technology still seems pretty immature.
Related tech that got traction is BLE in servers with corresponding apps, like Dell Quick Sync. Lets you flash the ID light of a server from your phone, among lots of other things.
Yeah but his "true self" isn't exactly something 99.99% of people enjoy. He's a robotic tool. Looks to me like he signed up for a "how to appear more human 101" course and now gesticulates with his hands non-stop.
Musk isn't a great rhetorician, and many people don't like his personality either. But some like him nonetheless, they empathize with him and see beyond that, because they see some of the drives and desires behind the unusual facade. I'm sure Zuckerberg signed up for such courses, but I don't think it's comfortable for him, or his audience either. Ignorance is bliss, forcing oneself to be hyperaware of ones own appearance, gestures and statements to please others seems wrong. Who enjoys such a lie?
It’s amazing how no one can be frank with him. “Look mark, the CEO doesn’t have to be the presenter. I’m sorry but you just can’t be the face of the company, it’s bad for business. Please, move aside, and get a normal person haircut”.
I'm one degree away from Mark. I dated someone who was an early employee at Facebook for a little while - all I can really say without revealing who they are. I just know they know Zuck, Cook, and a few others personally.
They told me that when Facebook's (or maybe it was Instagram's...) stories came out with video support, Zuck posted a super bizarre video introducing it, being the first one and all. And I guess it was just him awkwardly staring into the camera, not really saying anything. Almost like someone who thinks it's a photo but it's a video instead - though he was fully aware it was a video. His wife was in the background waving and stuff too.
The person I was seeing I guess texted him and said something to the effect of "hey this is super awkward, maybe you should re-post it with you talking about it", which I guess Zuck did.
So it's my impression that he's not exactly surrounded by yes-men, but instead that he's not really in touch with the social aspect of running one of the largest social networks on earth and how people really behave. I know a lot of people say it's autism but as far as I was told it's not - he's just strange.
This is hearsay of course, but I'm pretty confident that I was told the truth given who it was that I talked to about all this.
He's lived a different life than nearly anyone else. Certainly so caught up in his responsibilities to Facebook that he's been unable to grow and change and branch out and fail, and be rejected and forced to reinvent or repurpose himself the way most people do. It's impossible to imagine what my life would be like or how my perspective would be different if I was caught in a bubble of a project I started in my late teens turning into a near trillion dollar success that only grew and grew from the moment I started on it.
I was involved in a startup project the first couple years of college. We didn’t know anything about what we were doing so it languished in development hell and is still in it as far as I know, with a new crop of kids. I can’t imagine being stuck in that mindset, there’s a lot of maturing that happens when you have a boss and need to work with a team and he’s always been the head of this college project that’s worth a trillion dollars now. Doesn’t sound healthy at all
> Zuck posted a super bizarre video introducing it, being the first one and all. And I guess it was just him awkwardly staring into the camera, not really saying anything. Almost like someone who thinks it's a photo but it's a video instead - though he was fully aware it was a video. His wife was in the background waving and stuff too.
Maybe that was the point. People scrolling think it's just a selfie but then you realize his wife is moving in the background!
I think he is very perceptive when it comes to the logic and desires behind social interaction, like making personal attributes such as relationship status in Facebook explicitly public early on, and this because he could see and consider these things from the outside. He's different, but he should be proud of it, because without being different, he wouldn't have achieved what he did. The Trump network will show what happens when a different kind of personality has centralized control over a social network, in many a sense, it could be much worse.
>He is truly detached from us normal people and our human experience.
From watching his mannerisms and facial expressions, I get the feeling that he is high functioning but very much on the autistic spectrum, and emulates many subtle movements/behaviors during communication that come naturally to "normies". That's why he comes off as a robot deep in the uncanny valley.
I like to think of it as partly emulating with software some of the communication hardware that neurotypical people have innately. Which is why social interactions can be taxing for those with Asperger's, the extra cycles are draining and distracting, in addition to the necessary self consciousness which also costs some amount of compute.
That's what I think happens, yes. They should have learned something from the failure of Google+, after all they were directly involved in that, apparently they haven't.
It would have been so much less cringe if they had just hired an actor that people liked to deliver the message. No one likes Mark Zuckerberg, so why is he the talking head. He's a terrible actor and presenter. They really needed to pay a famous person to do it.
Although I do feel the same I think given the world we are in today, I wouldn't necessarily bet big on its failure. That would probably make too much sense.
Maybe. But the internet grew organically, over decades. It was not shoved down our throats by a corporation telling us “this is cool, this is what everyone wants now, and this is the future”. I’m sure VR/AR will be big too, but it’s going to take a while, many technological breakthroughs, and it’s not going to look like that.
It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men who never challenge him and only tell him what he likes to hear. He is truly detached from us normal people and our human experience.