I’ve been watching for a while for it to drop below Costco ($COST 219.8B). Won’t be long now. I look forward us acknowledging that Zuck was merely lucky, not some visionary.
If the metaverse gamble works out (and I don't think it will), he'll be called the greatest visionary since Edison. I despise FB and everything it stands for, but I quite like Zuck gambling big on VR.
I will be astounded if that pans out. I’m 100% convinced that few will actually want a headset strapped to their face for any extended time. The only relevant app is games and even this is limited in scope (I was an early adopter of the Valve Index)
VR isn't going anywhere. It's a category that's been tried over-and-over for 35+ years. It's AI, enterprise software like Workplace, and possibly AR. $50B on CapEx in the next 2 years, mostly buying GPUs. If you want to make money, buy NVDA and META now. Oculus could also become the next Nintendo Switch. They have a lot of money and a lot of degrees of motion to pivot on. Betting against piles of smart people who can make things would be foolish. Even if there isn't an immediately novel and wildly-popular use-case for their particular AI foundation, it's possible to lease AI-as-a-service like AWS with that amount of hardware.
During whatever time humanity has left, that is. I'm not sure I want to live in a world where everyone is stuck in virtual reality for 90% of their waking hours.
I guess all those people tethered to their phones 24/7 won't experience much of a change.
I agree, I don't see FB surviving past 5 years. On the other hand, you gotta give props to Zuck for throwing serious money at cutting edge VR research, shareholders be damned. FB will sink but VR will move forward.
One can only hope that Google (no innovation whatsoever, creepy) and Amazon (despicable dehumanizing machine) are next in line.
They've pushed smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and wireless earbuds to the masses, and turned them into product categories that rival or exceed Mac computer sales.
They don't get the features right all the time. Their software is rotting over time because users can't ogle it the way they can ogle hardware. The push for fake innovation, like wireless buds and eSIM, is slowly driving me insane. They constantly hide behind "eco-friendliness" when they make customer hostile decisions, like sticking with a proprietary Apple-only charging port and removing charging bricks from iphone boxes.
But goddamn they have had an innovative past 15 years.
I don’t disagree that those things are innovative, but apple is a hardware company, Google is software. I could list an equally impressive list of deep learning, nlp modeling and cloud orchestration innovations that have been release in the past 15 years too
Perhaps the difference lies in impact: Apple's innovation is tangible. I can feel the cold M1 Max laptop and appreciate the fact that it doesn't heat up or annoy me with fan noise. I notice my phone's speed when it executes javascript.
Lots of people (not me) seem to enjoy wireless headphones, and the ease of connection afforded by the H1/H2 chips.
I simply do not care about deep learning and NLP advancements. They invariably end up used to recommend me more garbage that I do not want. The only "ML" feature I can think of that's made my life any better? Facial recognition in Google Photos, because it's easy to find pictures of a specific person or animal. But that still mixes people up routinely, and is by no means comprehensive. Not to mention the fact that it's likely used to profile and track me behind the scenes at Google. I could take it or leave it.
I prefer DSLR pictures to smartphone photos, so I don't really care about ML image processing pipelines in phones much. Maybe night sight counts as an advancement, but I don't use it. Again -- DSLR, if I care about the photos at all.
The Pixel phones have some neat "ML" features, like instant translation and mostly-good transcription, that are definitely neat. But I'm not convinced that those matter much to me.
Cloud orchestration innovations have surely happened, but again, I'm not convinced they're a net good for the world. Kubernetes? Sure, it's impressive. In some cases it's damn useful. But it's also a great way to overcomplicate cloud machine management. Most smaller companies would probably do better with physical machines, cutting the cloud out entirely.
TL;DR: I can feel and see Apple's innovations. Google's are usually more indirect... and even when I can see them, I'm not convinced they're true useful advancement. They often feel like gimmicks.
In every way that matters to the world: Besides Meta, their core business is not ad-peddling. I spent close to a decade at Google, the dysfunction that was already present back then (~10 years ago) is now magnified to excess, end result being a corporation employing some of the smartest people in the world being effectively paralyzed and incapable of large-scale world-altering innovation even in the domain that they still have an iron grip on.
Google search is so ripe for disruption that I can't wait to see it dismantled by the first serious contender.
They spend more time iterating on existing products rather than replacing them, not perfectly, but Google will throw away something good for seemingly no reason.
That’s not really related to being innovative. There are companies that have been refining zipper manufacturing longer than Apple has existed, but I’m sure you’d consider apple more innovative than them.
They also have the ability to manipulate public sentiment. It's not a limitless ability, but that faculty alone is probably worth a decent amount to the right buyers.
I’ve been watching for a while for it to drop below Costco ($COST 219.8B). Won’t be long now. I look forward us acknowledging that Zuck was merely lucky, not some visionary.