You'll be able to have work meetings at a virtual office. You can do that now, but the experience will be better. You'll be able to socialize with friends across the world, meet up at virtual replicated areas (like a rooftop bar in NYC..) and meet other people while you're there. You'll be able to go on virtual dates with a long-distance partner. You'll be able to put on your lightweight VR headset and be stationed at a better workstation, with larger monitors where you can manipulate the interface with movements of your hands without the cost of buying such a work set-up in real life. You'll be able to sit on your couch, put on your VR headset and watch movies on a 100 inch TV screen without having to furnish your home with a TV.
The possibilities are endless. Where's your imagination?
Maybe I'm just getting old but I have zero interest in "socializing" that way. It sounds horrible, regardless of how good the VR is.
When I watch movies at home often I'm only halfway paying attention to the TV while simultaneously eating or talking to my family or working on my laptop. There's no way I'm going to wear a VR headset most of the time. The TV is hung on the wall so it takes literally zero space.
None of these applications are going to take off until the XR hardware becomes a lot more seamless. It needs to be as easy as pulling out a phone or putting on a pair of sunglasses. The metaverse will not succeed as long as it is tied to clunky VR strap on headsets with bad FOVs and low resolution that make you look like a dork.
Yes, unfortunately I bought in 2 days ago. The market is irrational. Facebook literally missed its projections by 3% and loses 0.15% of its active users (mostly due to things opening up) and investors panic. Good time to buy in.
Expectations were that it would do like the other internet giants and beat by miles. Yes it's weird that the expectations are not just their own performance, but that's often how the market works.
I think this pandemic has proved how sane the idea of a Metaverse would be.
Imagine meeting someone online, dating or friendship, you put on a lightweight VR headset and get transported to a replicated NYC rooftop bar, where loads of people from around the world are sitting, drinking and chatting. Socializing with a date or a group of people at the comfort of your home, going on outings, inviting your friends to your digital house, work meetings in a digital office instead of Zoom (I already seen companies doing this; VR meetings). People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world. Zoom, Skype, Discord will seem like old world relics.
It's like the appeal of World of Warcraft when it was a its peak, but not gaming - not appealing to just gamers. Appealing to everyone who's open to socializing online.
I guess it's just a matter of personal preference, because I can't relate at all. That would have sounded awful to me before the pandemic, and the experience of virtual everything during the pandemic only makes it sound even more awful.
> People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world.
Romantic relationships without physical proximity sounds totally dystopian to me.
I have definitely heard of more online relationships forming since the pandemic. IIRC I know of a relationship that has progressed to engagement since the pandemic that started as purely digital for the first year due to lockdowns and being in different countries.
Ultimately (as has always been true) the internet's greatest power has always been its reach. With free ubiquitous reliable video conferencing, you now have the ability to get to know someone anywhere in the world.
From a dating PoV you're basically getting a 2-3 order magnitude bump in potential partners. For many, I can see people giving up on the physical
(in the short term) to find an emotional match a worthwhile tradeoff!
YMMV - my own life now sprawls the whole globe, things like WhatsApp made maintaining global family ties so so so much easier in ways people really take for granted now. My parents used
to arrange by post a preset time for a 5 minute phonecall when they wanted to call their parents internationally. All trends point to remote connectivity getting more and more high fidelity.
But even if you're not very into socializing online. You'll be able to sit and work at an EMPTY desk, with no monitor and no mouse, put on your lightweight headset, and suddenly have 3 large monitors appear in front of you which you can manipulate with your hands (think Minority Report, Tom Cruise), while working in a more aesthetically pleasing environment.
You'll be able to sit in your empty living room, put on your VR headset, and suddenly have a 100 inch TV in front of you to watch movies -- without having to buy this TV in real life.
Buying a monitor may seem as ridiculous as buying a fax machine.
Serious question, what DPI do you estimate VR goggles would need to have in order to replicate the experience of looking at a 4K monitor from 30 inches away?
If this fantasy technology were actually invented (and made comfortable to wear and affordable) then I'd buy it, sure, but I'll believe that when I see it.
It doesn't seem like FB is well placed to provide this experience though, aside from having a pile of money and engineers.
You'd have to think Apple could do the trick with their history of building integrated hardware/software experiences and a similar war chest, but it's also far enough away from the core products of most of the giants that some outsider might get there first.
An observation that your post reminded me of: why do all these metaverse concepts replicate very uninteresting real world scenarios? I remember watching Zuckerberg do a demo of a work meeting and everyone was in... a drab meeting room. In a virtual world of infinite possibilities!
God, if I'm forced to strap on a VR headset just to be social with someone at least put me on one of Saturn's moons, not an NYC rooftop bar.
Who the hell wants to do that? After this BS over the last two years? People will absolutely laugh at the idea. Most people are sick and tired of this virtual shit. FB could not have picked a worse time to hype up some unreleased virtual reality world.
My kids play roblox and minecraft and watch roblox/minecraft videos on youtube, hours and hours long. Some youtubers make 1 hour long movies, these 100 days on minecraft sagas. Just to put into perspective there are basically ongoing minecraft/roblox soap operas on youtube... Amazon has even picked up on this... My kids even make a few tiktok and youtube videos and have gotten huge engagement. Even the youtubers who do (in real life) IRL videos adopt things from minecraft/roblox /among us.
Minecraft is more than a decade old at this point, but I’ve yet to see anyone over the age of 16 be interested in this kind of content. I’m not convinced that this will appeal to anyone but children
They're still growing year-over-year. They were just off their target in the last quarter by 3%. They're valued at $3.67 per share versus the $3.78 expected. Their stock literally dropped ~25% because they were only 3% off expected earnings. And lost 0.15% active users, which is expected as the world opens up again. I don't see what the big deal is. The market is overreacting.
Post close trading can be swing by a lot. The reaction I think is not because that they are off by 3%, the future growth looks only to be pretty dull , perhaps also why FB is making such huge gamble on VR.
The high P/E big tech companies enjoy is on basis of the implicit expectation to keep growing fast[1], if that on confidence on growth is no longer there, then price will reflect closer to a more traditional tech stock.
Tesla trades at P/E of 185x, Amazon - 58x, Microsoft - 35x, Google - 29x and FB - 23x[2]. I think it accurately reflects the market expectation of their respective future growth.
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[1] Same reason Tesla is valued so high despite relatively modest revenue, the expectation is massive growth on the back of their lead in the space and the accelerating shift towards EV.
[2] SAP, IBM, ORCL all trade in the same range today.
They have to invest in something if they want to remain relevant. They make loads of money from their ad revenue. They may not be able to acquire the next Instagram or TikTok when it comes.
Facebook is doing great. To put things in perspective:
- On average, they net around 35 billion a year. With a valuation (MC) of 887 billion.
- On average, Google net around 51 billion a year. With a valuation of 1.8 trillion.
Facebook is making 68% as much as Google, with its valuation at less than half the price. And over the past 4-5 years Facebook's revenue has grown on average 32%/year, while Google grows 23%/year.
Really undervalued company IMO.
And their revenue did grow. They grew year-over-year. Just missed their target by 3%.
The problem is of course, that Facebook is directly threatened by TikTok, while Google has a much stronger hold on its market segments. Google could continue growing, while Facebook actually shrinks.
I've never really understood this MBA mentality because growth must stop at some point. There are only so many humans on earth. The expectation that a company can grow forever is impossible, at least until we find an alien planet with a population willing to sign up for Facebook.
Right, of course. The claim wasn't "all companies must continue growing forever or they are bad companies / their stock will crash". It was rather "Facebook in particular's current valuation is based on investors predicting it will continue to grow".
When (not if) Facebook stops growing, it will be worth _something_. Owning its stock is a bet on what that number is, and the stock price reflects the market's collective estimate.
The stock market price today is based on the value people EXPECT the company to have at some point, not the one it has. If people expected it to grow much more, and it doesn't, the value falls to the level it possibly should've had in the first place.
It's not MBA mentality, it's stock investors mentality. I don't think Zuckerberg or any other executive is out there buying FB shares at $320. It's outsiders gambling on the continued growth.
Share buybacks usually indicate the company can't figure out what to do with their cash stockpile, and are doing a tax-advantaged dividend (it effectively gives the money to shareholders, but they don't have to incur a tax hit).
It could mean they're really certain it'll be worth more later, or it (more likely) could mean they ran out of ideas and are trying to shore up the stock price, too.
Their users growth has been lowering towards 0 for a few years and it's expected that users will eventually shrink. It's just symbolic when you pass the tipping point (although this might be local and not be the definitive tipping point).
As expected there's lot of nonfiction readers here. Does anyone else find that they get more out of fiction than nonfiction? There's a lot to learn from putting yourself in a character's shoes, seeing life through their eyes and witnessing their life unfold.
I'm currently reading 'Steppenwolf' by Hermann Hesse, and 'Of Human Bondage' by Somerset Maugham. Both novels are fictional representations of the author's life.
Not sure if getting more, but nonfiction reading is quite strenuous for me, as I try to retain as much information as I can. On the other hand, I read fiction for the experience, so even if I forgot everything I read after turning the page, it would be no problem.
I'm sure that a lot of these designers would love to have the freedom to try new things and to innovate. But unfortunately creating unique interfaces has a very high chance of confusing and frustrating users. Designers have to work within the confines of their users expectations.
" I am disappointed that the design community has gotten sucked into designing itself more than designing for others"
Designers focus on simplicity for others (their users), not for themselves. Much of Apple's early success comes from focusing on simplicity. Users want simplicity. Designers have to constantly remind themselves to keep it simple, rather than 'innovate' and overcomplicate things for the sake of creating something unique.
Google 'Picasso's bull' - it portrays the evolution of good design and the importance of simplicity.
- Work meetings
- Socializing
- Dating
- Creative endeavors
- Improved workspace
You'll be able to have work meetings at a virtual office. You can do that now, but the experience will be better. You'll be able to socialize with friends across the world, meet up at virtual replicated areas (like a rooftop bar in NYC..) and meet other people while you're there. You'll be able to go on virtual dates with a long-distance partner. You'll be able to put on your lightweight VR headset and be stationed at a better workstation, with larger monitors where you can manipulate the interface with movements of your hands without the cost of buying such a work set-up in real life. You'll be able to sit on your couch, put on your VR headset and watch movies on a 100 inch TV screen without having to furnish your home with a TV.
The possibilities are endless. Where's your imagination?