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jn1234

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I believe that at some point in the future they will launch a joint-venture for a fully automated Uber competitor with Tesla handling designing and building the vehicles and Google providing cash, self-driving software and building the actual app.

Musk is literally too good friends with Sergey Brin and Larry Page for this not too happen.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/elon-musk-and-larry-page-ha...

http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-secret-apartment-elon...

The Kochs are the 21st century Kochs. Peter Thiel hasn't had any major success as a political donor, while the Kochs have been wildly successful as political donors and furthering their political agendas.

You would think though if he was living in the US or Canada, he would at least make a more up-to-date pop reference than Rambo or Terminator. If he was living in the west, he would probably at least cite Mr. Robot or some "betrayed" hero like Jason Bourne.

To go back to the mobile analogy, I don't think Google chose to not compete on iOS vs the App Store. It's a large possibility that Facebook would be willing to lock down Oculus for more profits and Facebook has shown it wants to play hardball. I don't think developers would be able to ignore the Oculus demographic and they would be forced list their games on the Rift store.

Until Facebook decides that it wants a cut of all the sales on Oculus and locks down the platform, hence Valve's concern. There's only one App store on iOS vs Android.

Valve's main bargaining chip would be not allowing their games to run on Oculus. The recent push back on Oculus exclusives and Valve willing to float cash to developers means they are well aware of their situation.

True right now they are compatible, however it seems like that Facebook and Valve are on a collision course over what they think the ecosystem should be (and who is going to be the "winner").

The by far most interesting comment from the thread is this one (It's by Alan Yates who works on Vive/SteamVR) https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4osav8/lighthouse_tra....

Of course. We want AR/VR/MR to be ubiquitous. Over the past four years or so I've seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic techniques, next generation display technologies. But most of them are narrowly focused on their thing, and struggle alone to make a successful product. Partially this was just because the market didn't exist but also many of them were/are just trying to boil the ocean. The minimum viable product is now a pretty high bar and that can stifle innovation. We can offer a running start, the traditionally "hard" parts of HMD technology, the things other than GPUs that kept VR niche for so long. In return we ask that your device leveraging our technology works with our platform. And mostly that is it. We won't ask that it only works on our platform, we won't stop you from targeting other industries. This gives both you and your users freedom of choice and security that isn't dependant on either party's future decisions. It is a pretty good deal really. Our platform has a rapidly growing collection of great content for your end-users so your product won't be an orphan and you don't need to convince anyone to author for it. Day one people can fire up Tilt Brush and have their minds blown by your awesome new hardware.

If Valve games are "locked" to SteamVR and won't play on Oculus, then nobody is going to buy an Oculus. Does Facebook really think that people are going to choose Lucky's Tale over Portal 3 or Half-Life 3? Facebook is going to have to capitulate and focus on their hardware advantage.

It's laughable how outclassed Oculus is by Valve. If Valve were to release Half-Life 3 as an exclusive on Vive, Oculus as a gaming headset would be toast.

Valve has some of the most valuable franchises (Dota 2, Team Fortress, Portal etc) around and are under-utilizing them, not to mention they operate the largest PC gaming distribution platform.

Except /u/kn0thing reported Ellen according to a former SVP, /u/kickme444 who was the other employee getting fired that started this whole thing [1]. Additionally, Dacvak was fired by Ellen for having cancer proving Ellen was making the personnel decisions. His comments were deleted due to a non-disparagement clause but could be found here [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

[2] https://archive.is/kfrFM

Highway self-driving is pretty much consumer-grade now. Infiniti already has it in their vehicles. Telsa is planning on rolling it out this summer. The main problem is urban and suburban driving and dealing with unexpected situations such as jaywalkers or a cyclists running stoplights or a kid running out after a ball.

Except Google's core competency is software. Google has the advantage of being essentially controlled by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

They only need one of those things to succeed (cars). It's hard to imagine that one of the existing car companies has developed a reliable urban self-driving, that is better than Google's.

Google's fiber play has nothing to do with actually making money. It is about making sure that cable companies abide by net neutrality and not cutoff or strangle Google's bandwidth intensive services like YouTube.

It makes sense to have the base load be something that is easily dispatchable and reliable. Renewables are an option in the short term, however the holy frail is nuclear fusion, which is clean, reliable and relatively cheap (building the infrastructure). In the short term, it actually only makes sense to replace generation that becomes retired with renewables because of the carbon costs associated with building new infrastructure. It makes sense that an inefficient natural gas plant that runs a couple of times a year at extreme peaks, will have a smaller carbon footprint than building new infrastructure.