It's interesting that Portal never benefited from the COVID work-from-home boom, as it was excellently positioned for that.
Why buy a webcam desk tablet thingy that only works with Facebook when you can get an iPad and use FaceTime, Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx, and the list goes on into infinity?
An iPad is only $329 or less if you buy and old model and it can run millions of apps and be taken with you.
I think Facebook thought that this product might be nice for people who are too non-technical to use a tablet. But like, who is that customer exactly?
Reminds me of those internet appliances from the 90s. It was inevitable that regular computers would replace them.
Yes, having some sort of inexpensive video calling tablet can be more convenient but it's not convenient enough to justify over an iPad or phone video call.
1. "Man videoconferencing totally blows and is really expensive!" [1] "We've got lots of smart people and expertise in streaming video from live events, bet we could knock together a solution in no time" (a team builds internal FB solution)
2. "Man our internal FB videoconferencing rules! It's a shame all those plebes in the wider world can't experience how great this is" "What if we take the gizmo we've built for every meeting room and turn it into a consumer device?"
3. <don't worry about step 3>
4. Profit!
[1]This was absolutely the case circa like 2012. Cisco had the only really decent enterprise option and it was really expensive. All the other ones couldn't interoperate and were terrible.
People I talk to thought of it as a telescreen, not a video conferencing tool. That probably hurt sales.
I wonder if Meta could have made better pivots if they had accepted and embraced their untrustworthy image.