John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

Presumably if you’re meta you could pay the vendors enough to write drivers for any arbitrary OS

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 ...)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Vendors might say that they don't have the resources (man hours) and don't want to hand over documentation to external developers.

Writing drivers is easy, getting vendors to write *correct* drivers is difficult. At work right now we are working with a Chinese OEM with a custom Wifi board with a chipset with firmware and drivers supplied by the vendor. It's actually not a new wifi chipset, they've used it in other products for years without issues. In conditions that are difficult to reproduce sometimes the chipset gets "stuck" and basically stops responding or doing any wifi things. This appears to be a firmware problem because unloading and reloading the kernel module doesn't fix the issue. We've supplied loads of pcap dumps to the vendor, but they're kind of useless to the vendor because (a) pcap can only capture what the kernel sees, not what the wifi chipset sees, (b) it's infeasible for the wifi chipset to log all its internal state and whatnot, and (c) even if this was all possible trying to debug the driver just from looking at gigabytes of low level protocol dumps would be impossible.

Realistically for the OEM to debug the issue they're going to need a way to reliably repro which we don't have for them, so we're kind of stuck.

This type of problem generalizes to the development of drivers and firmware for many complex pieces of modern hardware.

XROS had a completely new and rapidly evolving system call surface. No vendor would've been able to even start working on a driver for their device, let alone hand off a stable, complete result. It wasn't a case of "just rename a few symbols in a FreeBSD implementation and run a bunch of tests".

> 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.

    > custom Wifi board

Why didn't you use something more mainstream? Cost?

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.

Probably some weird design spec or size requirement

Things you can’t buy: vendor who cares enough to replicate your exact use cases in their lab

In my opinion the difference is rather invention versus innovation. A better VR headset is innovation, transistors are an invention.