Zuck on buying Unity

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.

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

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

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

One of the most interesting memos about the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook.On this memo, Mark Zuckerberg starts to share how excited he was about what he could do to grow lnstagram as an independent brand and product while also having Kevin Systrom (Founder of instagram) take on a major leadership role within Facebook that would span all of t... See more

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

The third thing that I’d say is, I think it’s really important that the metaverse works for people, not just as consumers, but as creators, and that people economically have a stake in it as well. This is one of the lessons that I’ve taken away from the last five years of some of the issues that we’ve struggled with as well, is that it’s not enough... See more

Monopolistic. While most acquisitions fail, Zuck and Sheryl have been so good at acquiring companies that the government is stepping in post-hoc to try to undo them.