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Comment by brap | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

> when have you ever known a major innovation to come from a tech company that is already huge in a relatively unrelated area?

Xerox (modern computer), AT&T (Unix), Sony (PlayStation), Google (Maps, GMail), Apple (iPhone), Amazon (AWS)

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