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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

IMO metaverse was a bet.

It's perfectly fine to take a bet that you're not 100% convinced will pay off (professional poker players and traders understand this on a very deep level), as long as the potential upside is massively larger than the downside.

Zuck understood that Meta could take the hit if the metaverse bet didn't pay off, but that they'd be massively better off if it did, and they had their own platform. Apple's blatantly anticompetitive behavior around ATT was a prime example of what happens when your business is reliant on "platform overlords."

I'm not fully convinced that the metaverse era is over, though. If they can get Orion costs down and put something of that quality into serial production, I think they still have a chance there.

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> IMO metaverse was a bet.

It was FOMO. They had no vision, they had no plan, it was clear that it was only a thing because it was a buzzword at the time. Just like every other company stuffing crypto-adjacent things everywhere. It might have been a bet, but it was obvious that it was a really terrible one.

Reminds me of Ballmer buying Nokia or Cook buying Beats (or whatever the company was called.) Cook's bet might have worked out a little better than Nokia.

Not really. FB was choked by Apple and trolled by Google for so long, Zuck understood his position without a hardware platform in the furture. XR seems to be a reasonable bet which he already have an edge. If he won, he won big.

I do not know where this notion that Meta has given up on the metaverse comes from. Mark continues to talk about AR/VR at every opportunity and Reality Labs continues to invest big on it. The metaverse is a bet but its a 10 year bet that has not been played out yet.

> It was FOMO.

> Just like every other company

What other companies (besides Apple and a few startups that were specifically in the metaverse space) went in on the metaverse?

I think this was very much unlike AI and crypto, where everybody wanted a piece of the pie. Meta seemed a lot more invested in this than most of the other tech players, which makes FOMO an unlikely explanation to me.

No. "Bet" implies some sort of clear vision or value proposition. Metaverse was a dream.

It's okay to dream. It's not okay to burn billions of dollars on dreams with no proof of concept or business plan. Set aside the question of whether or not it's a bad idea - that's just plain bad execution.

The Orion is the proof of concept. The metaverse that Mark is thinking of is as ambitious as Musk's Mars plans. And it is something that requires large amounts of capital and time.

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