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Comment by InkCanon | Hacker News Reader

It's a clear sign Meta leadership has clearly lost the plot, giving in to hype instead of any vision.

Meta leadership have rarely had a vision beyond “how do we capture the success others are having in this space”. I suppose that’s a vision in and of itself but not a very inspired one.

This is the case for most of their successful products:

- Facebook itself started this way for Zuck

- Instagram and WhatsApp were purchases to corner that market against incumbents, as is Thread

- Oculus was a purchase to try and get their own app ecosystem after their phone project failed.

They have brilliant engineers and put out interesting stuff, but I don’t think there’s a top down vision.

Take oculus, their vision has been scattershot and even Boz says they basically make tons of different product directions and then decide what goes to market. Which sure, can work, but that also implies they don’t have a North Star to shoot for. Quest Pro was a failure and they released three types of Oculus lines close to each other (Rift, Go, Quest) before realizing the Quest was the real success path.

Similarly with AI, their approach has been to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Like their celebrity AI chatbots ( https://youtu.be/sfdzkHawZLo?si=oCKAbFHjiOlFRKKh ) or sticking GenAI in every product without a specific user story.

Again, great engineering work in all of their pursuits. But if you analyze any given product venture, it’s always throwing ideas at the wall and hoping one catches.

In general this all feels right, but I don' think that a lack of a grandiose vision is necessarily a problem for a company (Facebook's mission of 'make the world more open and connected' boiled down to 'senator - we sell ads'). Product design is about delivering things that people want. Observing trends and trying to get ahead of them somehow is a big part of what makes for a successful product. The bigger issue for Meta right now is that they are not as effective at this game as they used to be. To some extent this might be an issue of brand (the Facebook portal was a great product but nobody trusts the company). But based on my experiences with their products I feel like this gets things backwards. People don't like their brand because their products suck (Apple sucks up way more personal data, but thousands of Apple fans will crawl from the woodwork to defend them) If their core products were good experiences things would be different. The engineering talent at Facebook is truly top notch and while they are good on recruiting I think a lot of it comes from a culture of excellence on the technical side. But the product and UX directions of Meta feel off. Accounts alone has personally burned me. I have an Oculus quest that was effectively reset because of Meta's accounts transitions. My Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook accounts were all separate, and are all now partially merged but transition sucked for all of them with no benefit to me the user.

Yes, part of successful product design is skating to where the puck is (what consumers want), but vision is thinking multiple steps forward to get it where it needs to be (what consumers need but don’t know yet).

That account issue is precisely because meta doesn’t have vision. At best, they’re slightly better than Google, but they very much are cut from the same cloth of throwing multiple takes of something at the wall to see what works. Other companies do so internally, Meta and Google do so externally and go through many deadends as a result.

Was that not obvious enough when they renamed to Meta?

It seems everyone has forgotten the absolute failure that this shift has been.

I don't fault them for taking risks and failing (I think at the time there was still an argument for VR, could be possible they were ahead of the curve). I think the tipping point is when they're actively pushing for things that degrade user experience.

Ahead of the curve? Their "virtual meeting" software presentation had graphics that made you look like a Nintendo Mii avatar from 2006, and couldn't draw arms or legs.

I dont understand why meta didnt pair up with vrchat/gamedev/game engine dev at the time. Sure they got John Carmack, but their presentation is so much worse. Its so hard not to draw comparison with the other half baked crypto metaverse.

Meanwhile Vive Index not only have Alyx but they even bring out Portal themed toybox to showcase the hardware.

Their execution was indeed almost comically bad. I suspect it was because they had really wanted to focus on the B2B market, so they made the most sanitised virtual world possible. The overall VR direction was not entirely ridiculous, although it was clear on the ground people were much more in love with the idea of VR than the reality of it.

The vision is simple: drive engagement to get you to give up more information about yourself to sell to advertisers and get your eyeballs on their app to see ads made by said advertisers.

If they can get you to do that to an AI, well, why not?

... besides the obvious risks to society and mental health, which Zucc has never cared about before.

The bear is sticky with honey

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