Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

This would be an interesting but perilous pivot... trying to get into cloud infra at this point seems like an insane idea. What would even be the attraction for company to want to run on FB cloud vs one of the established players that now have a decade plus of real world operations experience from running 3rd party customer workloads?

If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Valve or build a gaming platform. I don't know how they can be successful in whatever the fuck the Metaverse is without a gaming/media platform.

View on HN

> figuring out how to buy Valve

He would step in a long queue, and would get the same answer everyone in front of him: Gaben wouldn't let it slip out even from his cold dead hands.

> "Gaben wouldn't let it slip out even from his cold dead hands"

Maybe that's an idea

> If I am Zuck

All of these growth idea sounds incredibly boring. More likely? Maybe, but incredibly boring. Meanwhile meta is at least sounds pretty interesting.

There need to be some fun for him to just not permanently retire on his Hawaiian Island.

>Meanwhile meta is at least sounds pretty interesting.

But does it? It sounds hopeful for someone that has no interest in the real world and only wants to create an imaginary world for themself. For those that actually like to step away from the keyboard and experience other aspects of the world around them, this is just another yawn.

They already have a gaming platform. It’s the Oculus store (soon “Meta” I imagine) and they’ve been working on it for years.

In a world where Activision is worth $70b, Valve would be worth similar. And you would have to leave them alone post acquisition because of their eccentric organizational style. And hope that Gaben maintains and Mike stay centered despite receiving $35b in the bank overnight.

Anyway Facebook's cash position is $60b, they can't afford it

>they can't afford it

Ever heard about non-all cash deals?

Besides, that $60-some B is after nearly $20B in buybacks from Q4 so they could've without it. But as they did, some two months of saved up FCF and they can again.

Too bad Bungie and Activision are off the table!

I like these Zuck spitball ideas tho.

Is the idea really that the metaverse is their big next market? I like VR but who the heck believes FB will lead it?

Time to pick up EA and make Fifa and Madden exclusive to the Metaverse

Well they are leading it right now and no one is really stepping up to do anything about it unfortunately.

Sony could if they were game enough to compete with the Oculus Quest and build something that would work either standalone or wirelessly with a PS5 to handle more intensive games. Same goes for MS ofc.

I think the big fuckup by FB/Meta here is not having the foresight to acquire Unity no matter the cost. They should have made a massive stock deal for it even if it caused their own stock price to take a massive hit in the short term.

The long term benefit of owning the most pervasive toolchain + the most dominant VR platform would have essentially ensured their market position for the foreseeable future. The only other engine that is half-decent for VR is Epic's UnrealEngine and there is a huge step up in complexity, pipeline etc from Unity to get there.

You mean “Meta” will lead it?

They can always try the same strategy GCP adopted: huge discounts.

If you’re paying retail for GCP, you are getting fleeced.

I just think they're out of time at this point to get in on B2B cloud computing... they may have the know how to build great data centers and stuff but there is a lot of work to go from "FB only" to "Anyone". Let's say they jump into this, what is the earliest they could realistically start taking customers 18 months? Then you need to convince companies to adopt or migrate stuff onto a fledgling new platform. They have near zero experience internally dealing with this kind of enterprise sales and support.

If they wanted to go down that route they needed to start around 2015.

while i'm sure they could get something out the door in 6-12 months that would satisfy somebody somewhere, I'd say more like 3+ years before you'd have anything that any companies would start betting the farm on.

Is it really insane? Facebook knows how to optimize pytorch and ML applications more than anyone. They can sell that on the market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com