[Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.
Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!
Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.
Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.
That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.
Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.
According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55 billion since 2019.
$55 billion in losses over ~5 years? That’s a substantial amount.
Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.
give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill probably have money spare for me and possibly descendants to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.
People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m for 27.8 years).
We should call billions thousand millions.
In a lot if countries a thousand million is a milliard and a million million is a billion. But somehow US English skipped the -liard numbers and it’s influencing UK English these days as well.
These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:
British usage: Billion has meant 109 in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.[12][13][43][15]
Before the widespread use of billion for 109, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.[16] The long scale term milliard, for 109, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.
I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.
You could have, you know, not bought and ruined oculus, and destroyed the VR ecosystem.
I was at GDC the year of the acquisition. There were Facebook suits walking around the showroom floor writing checks to sign exclusivity deals with anyone showing off a VR game.
Facebook flooded the market with cash, but failed to secure any Killer App to get people on their product. I wouldn’t say they ruined Oculus so much as it continues to be an unsolved technology that wasn’t ready for this level of exposure. I still can’t use the damned thing for more than an hour without feeling nauseous, and Meta was trying to gear up Oculus headsets for mass adoption by office workers.
The games market isn’t what they’re fixated on. They want this to be standard hardware for excel-book jockeys.
I suspect that we’ll end up not with the gaming market being where this sticks, but entertainment. Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
My neck is already hurting from craning all the time. And I’m guaranteed to miss the best part of the movie because I was looking in the wrong direction.
Well, if I didn’t have to make a face book log in to use one. If not for that I would consider one to play in steam. Even if I had to have it tethered.
I think they don’t require that anymore. It’s a “Meta login” which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
Welcome to the classic social media 100m dash. Become a popular dunk target on socials > get people to call such and such choice as a dealbreaker > stop doing such and such > it is now “not enough”, or “they’ll enshittify it later” or “a slippery slope”.
Which fine, whatever. I’m not saying Meta are “good guys” (no corporation is, honestly). What I will say is a) that is not a particularly productive or functional way to engage with pretty much anything, especially when there is no comparable alternative to a product, and b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible? People will give me crap for it regardless, so I may as well get to sell some sweet, sweet data.
FWIW, I’m skeptical of the ability of Meta to turn around the VR market as a whole, I don’t like many of their privacy and content moderation practices and I no longer use Facebook, Instagram or Threads. But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society, and I do have a Quest headset, which I agree is the best price to performance you can buy and works flawlessly with PC VR both wired and wirelessly.
I’m not reading anymore of this thread, but go move to the EU and request all the data those companies you mentioned have on you. You will see a truly staggering amount of your day to day info from some of them. Facebook and google are just advertising companies trying to get their thumbs in every pie they can convince enough people to buy into. Part of that is designing their products to require phoning home. The issue isn’t signing in. Signing in is just the trojan horse to make sure every bit of data they pull from you is tied to the right advertising account ID. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do that, even if they have enough money to lobby for its legality. Even if every single company on earth was freely doing it to the same degree people should still push for a change.
The business world is truly a slippery slope. Google made unethical digital advertising into a major market, and now even if they close shop somebody else will come fill the gap. The only way to put the power back in people’s hands is to regulate them out of existence but that will never happen if most people don’t even know it’s happening because you can’t even fucking complain about it on the internet without a hundred reply thread jfc
No, hold on, get it right, the 100 post thread is about somebody defending something tangentially related to them. Thread was nice and short with just complaining, it was when somebody pointed out that the requirement people were complaining about had been removed that the massive dogpile started.
And yes, by the way, I do know what data these companies have on me. I pulled all my Google data just last week, all 50 gigabytes of it. I agree that regulation is the answer to this. Absolutely. Everybody knows that, nobody is finding that via a rant about factually incorrect anecdotes about Meta’s VR headset, of all things.
But also, I have an Android phone. With a Google account on it. Do you not have a phone? Nobody is saying to not complain about abusive data mining or breaches of privacy, but you don’t have to performatively pretend to never engage with them or that the reason they get away with it in absence of regulation isn’t that they do make things people want or need.
This conversation boils down to whether it’s a moral imperative to turn your chosen cause into your entire personality at the expense of reality and beyond any nuance whatsoever. And honestly, in the current sociopolitical context, and despite being just about the most superfluous demonstration of this imaginable… man, it’s such a bummer.
