Meta seems to be completely tone-deaf when it comes to products and features. I wonder if this is a function of a single person, surrounded by people with little incentive to disagree, having all the decision making power in a company.
I guess it's obvious, but haven't really thought about this. Back in the day we had media companies and advertisers. Magazine publishers/newspapers/TV Studios on the one hand and the Leo Burnetts/Ogilvy/Wieden+Kennedy on the other. There was always a tension between what advertisers wanted and what creatives wanted. The studio/publishers knew that bowing completely to advertisers was a fast track to making crap and the advertisers knew they needed to remind the publishers that they are only as good as their audiences.
With Meta we these have more or less merged. It's not really clear now who the customer is. They need to attract both eyeballs and money. I'm not sure what the long-term consequence of that is, but my hunch is it leads to accounting and advertising winning since they actually generate money. And the result is junk creative.
I mean it is the company that changed names to "Meta"verse, have this incredible piece of technology in the Quest but then didn't bother to do almost anything inside the actual "Meta"verse that they changed the company name to.
I can see my Quest 3 on the shelf next to me. Something I really love but don't put on much because it is like entering into a giant virtual empty park with a couple of pieces of half finished play ground equipment.
Pointless AI image generation on Instagram seems completely on brand to me.
This and and other thing like Zuckerberg’s desire to integrate facial recognition into Meta’s Ray-ban glasses puts him in squarely in the lead for world’s creepiest human.
Not to forget the whole thing with Free Basics. Zuck is smart enough to know why trying to subvert net neutrality in developing countries is a bad thing, and he did it anyway.
Of all the vilified tech billionaires, Zuck is the only one that I actually suspect of being "evil" -- he knows exactly how his business decisions are bad for society, he just doesn't care. He does business pure minimax style, unwavering focus to fiduciary duty, and that's likely why he was able to build Facebook/Meta into what it is.
Any best on if they will just re-release this under the radar once the press attention dies down? Zuck isn't spending billions to just not release this stuff.
Even after making insane capex moves, Meta has always remained profitable through it. In fact, Meta has never reported a quarter loss since going public.
They literally can burn billions and be okay with it. This feature wasn't worth the billions though, the underlying ai tech was which will ofc be repurposed and is used elsewhere also
People usually respond to this, "But he apologized". Well, of course he did. The question is: did he really change his attitude? Because from his actions we can infer not only he didn't, it became worse.
What a quote
reply