Zuck on buying Unity

Facebook has on the order of 10,000 designers and engineers working on AR/VR. They are making a massive investment, and it appears to be working. The only other plausible contender right now is Apple. There are rumors they have a serious effort, but they are ultra secretive so we don’t really know. Google and Amazon don’t seem to be investing in AR... See more

Facebook has bet big on AR and VR as the next smartphone (and as potential liberation from Apple's control), so Mark Zuckerberg has naturally started saying metaverse a lot. But VR today seems to be at risk of stalling out as no more than a subset of hardcore games.

First, I believe VR will be a major computing platform, as or more significant than the phone and PC were. Facebook should sell about 10 million Oculus Quests this year. The headset will continue to get smaller, lighter, higher res, more powerful, and with many more and better apps. This will drive exponential growth the same way it did with PCs an... See more

I think the most important piece here is that the virtual goods and digital economy that’s going to get built out, that that can be interoperable. It’s not just about you build an app or an experience that can work across our headset or someone else’s, I think it’s really important that basically if you have your avatar and your digital clothes and... See more

The Impending VR Moment

The iPhone didn’t happen in a vacuum. Apple needed to learn to make low-power devices with the iPod; flash memory needed to become viable at an accessible price point; Samsung needed to make a good enough processor; 3G networking needed to be rolled out; the iTunes Music Store needed to provide the foundation for the App Stor... See more

I have mixed feelings about Facebook being the likely winner here. On the one hand, it’s the last founder-run of the big 5 tech companies, and I admire Zuck’s vision and aggression. On the other hand, Facebook has a history of creating closed systems that don’t interoperate, charge high take rates, arbitrarily change rules on developers, and other ... See more

MZ: I think that it all kind of fits together as one platform, but I’ve been more optimistic about virtual reality than most other people have. I think in the tech industry, there’s been this view that VR is sort of an entrée to this, but really augmented reality is going to be the big thing. I’ve always been a little more balanced on that, where I... See more