Mark Zuckerberg Is Going to Kill His Company

https://ez.substack.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-is-going-to-kill

by mindracer • 4 years ago

31 28 4 years ago

ez.substack.com

sp3322• 4 years ago

Facebook/Instagram had already stagnated. They had so many users their products were just competing with each other. But investors want growth, so they were doomed already. I think Zuckerburg picked the right time, moving when the company was at peak valuation and pouring capital into R&D. I don't like the new Horizon junk, but I'm not convinced that Meta doesn't have enough cash to distort reality enough to make some kind of VR thing, a "thing". It's a gamble, but it's got better odds than doing nothing and fading away.

lob_it• 4 years ago

Stagnation is not a 21st century innovation. Its obvious that Zuck is not catering to 1st world needs, but to his own desires. MP2H

Stale and sterile may describe the psuedo-innovation that much of social became by 2020.

potatoman22• 4 years ago

What's wrong with him killing Meta? Better to spend human effort on advancing virtual reality than fine tuning social media platforms.

WallyFunk• 4 years ago

And VR is a risky bet. Many have tried investing in VR but failed. The difference is the deep pockets. As if somehow by having more dollars, that this makes VR 'better'. You need traction, and that means making it super cheap to participate. Not everyone can afford 1000$ headsets, they're too busy saving for the next iPhone.

david2ndaccount• 4 years ago

What’s up with all the anti-meta posts/youtube videos/etc. lately? Where were they 3 months ago?

icapybara• 4 years ago

Meta had their quarterly earnings report this week.

vcryan• 4 years ago

I can't speak for the accuracy of these predictions, but I welcome Zuckerberg to kill his company. The tone of this post seems like alarm or indignation but the death of Facebook (or whatever its named today) is a celebratory event not something to cause apprehension.

Burn it to the ground

chizhik-pyzhik• 4 years ago

This blog post seems like a lot of angry emotional statements without much analysis

stuntkite• 4 years ago

Him burning down his company for any reason is kind of a baller move and fun to watch, but honestly, I think the metaverse play is going to pay off. People are just confused because they don't understand that isn't not really a video game. It might not work, but he's not broke. He has all the control. It's his company. I am not a Zuck booster at all, but yeah. Fuck Fb and all that social shit. I don't trust him at all. But yeah, do something interesting, burn all your capital trying to do something different. You don't see behavior like that out of big operations often.

sfmike• 4 years ago

Yes the suspending and stripping of ad accounts en masse is leaving billions on the table from facebook/ig/meta.

YouWhy• 4 years ago

The post spends a lot of words circling the core point without engaging it directly.

The point, IMHO, is: like Genghis Khan, Zuckerberg is an empire conqueror rather than an empire maintainer (*). Everything MZ built up to now has been unreservedly secondary and reactive with respect to a preexisting state of things. To his credit, MZ was able to untap the full value where previous owners couldn't. But there was never a holistic vision how things should be in the steady state. At a personal level MZ seems to lack a lot of the skills necessary to keep the system going in steady state.

Now MZ claims that he sees a new area for conquest, but there's no preexisting kingdom there, just wilderness. He was never good at wilderness situations before, hence he's unlikely to succeed. The End.

user39393822• 4 years ago

What will take off like wildfire is AR with glasses that look like regular glasses people wear anyway. That’s decades away.

Even Facebook doesn’t have the capital to shortcut decades of R&D on all the components that will go into making that a reality.

ilaksh2• 4 years ago

It's not decades. That's ludicrous. Actually those glasses exist, they just are lacking in field of view or some 3d tracking abilities. Such as the new Spectacles.

There is no reason to think it will take two decades to increase the field of view.

GianFabien2• 4 years ago

I saw AR glasses the other day (forget where) that looked almost normal, but were like $4000. The glasses are only half the issue, the other half is the CPU power required to drive them. How does a 4lb fanny pack look and feel?

user39393822• 4 years ago

Maybe I should clarify glasses that people want to wear-- I mean like this https://www.newsanyway.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/trac-v...

It would need to last at least 4-5 hours and probably have a 5G modem. I don't see that happening any time soon. That's to say nothing of the software side.

kyriakos• 4 years ago

It won't take that long. Maybe making the glasses more like a dumb terminal while the actual processing happens on a larger wearable device will allow for regular looking AR glasses to become a reality much sooner than that.

Cupertino950143• 4 years ago

There's a ready-made textbook solution for a company that can't make efficient use of its cash:

Return it to the shareholders, and let them find their own efficient use for it.

i.e. pay a dividend. Yes, he would be paying a lot of it to himself, but maybe his personal investment staff can put it to use for him.

Most corporate managers would rather set their money on fire than pay a dividend. MZ is no different. Normally a hostile takeover would fix that problem, but he's got himself so wedged in there with the voting shares that a takeover may be impossible.

jjeaff• 4 years ago

Out of the question. A dividend would require both the corporation and the recipients to ... gasp ... pay taxes!

GianFabien2• 4 years ago

There are two ways to price a stock:

1. On the basis of how much you expect a bigger sucker than yourself to pay for it.

2. On the basis of yield on your investment, aka dividend / share multiplied by some "reasonable" number, e.g. 15 which implies 7% interest rates.

Since there seems to be fewer gullible investors, on the basis of dividend earnings, Meta is worth exactly zero. Time to pay a dividend or burn the cash. Which to even gullible investors looks bad.

Cupertino950143• 4 years ago

Excellent answer.

The classical answer is "the value of all future dividends, discounted to the present." #2, in other words.

The expectation was, even if it pays no dividends now, when it's really successful it'll start.

Or often it's #1, as you said.

sp3322• 4 years ago

Why would he take money out of Meta when what he wants is to fund VR R&D?

Cupertino950143• 4 years ago

"what he wants" is unfortunately the guiding light, since he has the voting shares, but the money belongs ultimately to the shareholders.

Apple pays a dividend: 0.59% yield at current price. Microsoft pays one, 1.17% yield.

They both recognized a long time ago that they couldn't promise the shareholders that the company would invest the money better than they could.

milkey_mouse• 4 years ago

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

ilaksh2• 4 years ago

Who knows what will happen, but AR/VR/MR seems like a sensible big bet to me.

People don't get it because the headsets are big and uncomfortable and the graphics aren't very impressive or realistic. But they are getting better.

I think that is someone comes along in the next few years with something like the new Spectacles but with a 90 degree field of view and less than $500, it could become extremely popular.

Or suppose next year an Apple headset has an application with very realistic graphics for mixed reality or VR "teleporting" where realistic faces and bodies appear in your house. Or you go to some club or something and it looks completely realistic.

To me this stuff will take off when the graphics and software get a bit better, better field of view, cheaper. But it's a matter degrees at this point.

What could very well happen is that AR/MR completely blows up in the next three years, but with some other company making a slightly better and cheaper glasses or whatever and a totally open metaverse platform. That will prove that he was going in the right direction, but no one will admit they misjudged the goal.

rapjr9• 4 years ago

I've been a proponent of VR for 30 years and have noticed that there is strong resistance to it, not because of clunky headsets or field of view or graphics quality. The objection seems to derive more from concerns of a Matrix style world, where one company controls a form of reality where people spend significant time. And the control really is complete, the worst dictatorship is nothing compared to the control the owner of a virtual reality has. I have no proof, but my suspicion is that this is why people in power object to the very idea of virtual reality, it usurps their power. You could say facebook or twitter or Youtube are already like this, yet there is something different about an immersive environment, perhaps a suspension of disbelief because we generally accept what our senses tell us as real. VR is closer to a direct channel into peoples brains than text or video is. It is a synthetic reality. If a bat flies towards you in a video you do not duck, in a VR environment you may very well duck.

tibbydudeza• 4 years ago

Twitter and Facebook should join Myspace - something shiny and new will always come along (TikTok).

singularity2001• 4 years ago

Despite all the justified critique I wonder whether there is currently an orchestrated propaganda machine trying to drag Facebook down.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Going to Kill His Company

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