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

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520 points OlympicMarmoto | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.332s | source
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lukev ◴[29 Aug 25 17:53 UTC] No.45067307[source]▶
This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument.

But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional.

But the long term value could potentially be astronomical.

Just another case of quarterly-report-driven decision making, I suppose. Sigh.

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1. CamperBob2 ◴[29 Aug 25 21:16 UTC] No.45069483[source]▶
But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative.

They have; Taligent comes to mind. You may not have heard of that -- or more likely, you have but just forgot about it -- but it's a good object lesson (no pun intended) in why a successful new OS is hard to just conjure into existence. There has to be a crying, desperate need for it, not just a vague sense that This Time We'll Get It Right.

You could probably cite OS/2 Warp as a less-obscure example of the same phenomenon.