But is that a good use of Meta's money? Compared to making a few patches to Linux to fix any performance problems they find.

(And I feel bad saying this since Meta obviously did waste eleventy billion on their ridiculous Second Life recreation project ...)

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bbarnett 7 days ago | parent [-]

I don't like Meta, but there used to be a time where big corp used to spend 30% of its budget on R&D. It's how we got all the toys we have now, R&D labs of big Bell and others.

So please don't mock the spend. Big spends fail sometimes, and at least people were paid to do the work.

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crote 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

The difference is that organisations like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were primarily tech-first: innovations were the result of very clever and creative people doing blue skies research. The most groundbreaking stuff shocked the world while it was still a hacked-together demo, and similarly the cost of failure was quite low.

On the other hand, Meta's experiment is primarily CEO-driven. The outcome is predetermined, changing direction is not possible. Sure, clever engineers get to draw the rest of the owl, but that's not very useful when it turns out that everyone needs a horse instead.

They are spending a fortune, but rather than getting 900 crappy ideas to throw away and 100 great ones to pick from for continued development, they are developing 1 technological marvel nobody is interested in.

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throwway120385 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

It was also pretty obvious how the VR glasses would support Meta's existing goals. It would give Meta total power over what you see and who you can speak with through their system. It's a natural extension of their total control over how people interact with on the Internet. And I think the only reason it failed is because it was expensive and dumb-looking.

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ForHackernews 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Arguably the distinction you're pointing at is macroinvention (the transistor) vs microinvention (a better VR headset): one is a refinement of something that exists, another is transformative opening up whole new worlds of possibility. https://www.antonhowes.com/blog/macroinvention-vs-microinven...

	▲	mastermage 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In my opinion the difference is rather invention versus innovation. A better VR headset is innovation, transistors are an invention.
	▲	eru 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Eh, the very first transistor they invented was pretty crappy and not all that useful. Every improvement after that would count as micro-invention in your dichotomy.

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eru 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I don't like Meta, but there used to be a time where big corp used to spend 30% of its budget on R&D. It's how we got all the toys we have now, R&D labs of big Bell and others.

Just because you spend a lot of your money on R&D, doesn't mean that each R&D project is automatically a good one. You still have to make choices between them.

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rwmj 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's just that it was so obviously going to fail, because there's no mass market for a product that you have to strap onto your face. You didn't need to spend billions to learn that.

If they'd spent the money researching nuclear fusion or space flight or a new way to develop microprocessors, I would be cheering their efforts even if they had failed in the end.