The reality in Shiny-land is you are only as good as your most recent quarterly report. Thatās why companies donāt want to put anything into R&D, and do a stealth liquidation, to make the CEO look good.
Iām still not very bullish on Meta. Despite all the excitement, Q4 earnings were down over Q4 last year. And I donāt think the Metaverse is going to be the hit Zuck thinks it is. I heard an interview with Bill Gurley the other day. Gurley is a venture capitalist involved in tech start ups. Gurley was hugely impressed by the book Snow Crash which is where the term āmetaverseā was first used (as far as I know). So when he heard about a company developing a metaverse, he jumped in and invested in it. The company produced Second Life, which was somewhat popular (and still exists today). But it never really took off. Gurley did an analysis to figure out why, and concluded it is really just role playing. And most people who are interested in role playing want to be out killing orcs or something and not mowing a virtual lawn.
Zoom calls work fine for dispersed meetings. I donāt think there is any need or want to have avatars instead of actual faces. Iāve watched a few Meta videos and it just doesnāt seem that cool.
An older friend this afternoon was discussing his game development days. He was not a coder. Instead he was making the novel 1984 into a rewrite to use in a video gameā¦role play. I asked if it sold? He said not at all. I knew that before I asked. Another friend a waiter at the club house bar said he has a role play game he wants to make. He is not going to do it because he is trying to support two kids with his wife. Iād worry if that was his gameplan.
Zucker is not just making a metaverse to replace zoom meetings. That is just an exercise. The platform will be for programming other games like killing orcs. It is not just the first thing you see and that is it.
In Microsoft Developer >> Learn all the tools from C# up >> Blazor >> in Visual Studio by Microsoft >> Using Unity and Launching it in PlayFab. Other than Unity it is all Microsoft. Blazor might not be that it is the least of it. Microsoft does train to use Blazor in this context and more. PlayFab is on top of Azure.
Meta wants to make such an infrastructure for developers from the ground up.
I donāt know much about the under the hood stuff. But Iāve watched some of Meta promo videos and they lookā¦underwhelming. Sure, you can go to a virtual concert and see Justin Timberlakeās avatar perform, basically like watching a 3-D animationā¦or you could watch an HD video and see the real Justin Timberlake perform. Sure, some people would think it is cool, but it just doesnāt sound that cool to me.
Every new tech is underwhelming. One of the reasons why being the first to offer a tech sucks. The second guys who offer it clean up. Meta is not the first. But all of it needs more robust specs on your PC/Mac.
One of my kids bought an Oculus Quest. For the first three months, he was on it nonstop, we even needed to leave a room cleared out so he could use it. Then he used it periodically over the next month or two. And for the last few months he hasnāt used it at all. Literally zero usage.
When he first got it, we all tried it out a few times, but nobody besides him ever got into it.
Just an anecdote, but it is entirely possible that people donāt want to wear a āvideo maskā all that much.
I am not sure how that will be creatively worked out. It is a mask now perhaps because no one in engineering has figured out how to project the images in a different way.
For instance a screen instead of mask or googles. The screen being in a rounded shape before the eyes. Yet the digital hardware making up for the curvature so you do not sense the curve.
I was active in Second Life for a few years. At first they provided Linden Dollars (essentially game currency) to people who hosted events, like games and so on, but they stopped doing that. After that it was just sex clubs and gambling casinos (not open to people in my state) and a few rich people who liked to build imaginary islands (and the occasional non-profit cause or church group). In the Metaverse, content will be king. (Iām currently in Elder Scrolls Online, with its never-ending content and ability to build your own house etc., even though Iām not really much of a sword-swinger.) Anyhow, you canāt just build a platform, you have to give people a reason to hang out there beyond just a chat room.
