> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.
Ahistoric jibber jabber. Microsoft gave it their very best shot with Windows Phone. Facebook renamed the entire company to make VR happen. These companies have shoved everything they got into making these platforms, and their fate would not have been different if they had been given another billion.
Platforms are hard to make, and wanting it bad enough is not enough to make one.
Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense. They are the only company with any successful experience.
Fair enough, but I'd point out that, unlike Second Life, Meta didn't buy pants. If you want a chronicle of wasted spending regarding Microsoft and mobile devices, Google "Tomi Ahonen."
> Meta didn't buy pants
They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring.
VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves.
Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.
Ehh, Tomi Ahonen always came across as someone who was letting his emotions cloud his judgment (maybe the N9 was his pet project?) which was not great for a "consultant." Sure enough when I looked around there was substantial criticism to be found, e.g. https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/top-ten...
Also wasted spending is not quite the same as "not wanting to spend" -- it's more, to GP's point, "spending a lot unsuccessfully." I got the sense a lot of the friction Nokia and Windows Phone faced were due to Google (and to some extent Apple) using the market dominance of their properties (Android, YouTube, Search, Maps) to suppress competition.
I suppose it's fair play for what MSFT did in the OS and browser wars, but they got dinged pretty hard by Antitrust and played nice for a decade+ after that. Google is starting to see the antitrust blowback for it's actions only now, long after the competition has been crushed.
> Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense.
It makes a lot of sense to get into a massive legal battle with one of the most deep-pocketed companies on the planet?
I don't think they intended for that part to happen. Once that becomes an eventuality, it is obviously no longer a good idea, but you don't get to know if you hit the jackpot before you pull that lever.
I don't know. Some of it did seem like short attention spans and not enough perseverence. But what do I know being far from an insider.