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

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520 points OlympicMarmoto | 3 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.667s | source
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agsnu ◴[29 Aug 25 19:11 UTC] No.45068169[source]▶
Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

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ronsor ◴[29 Aug 25 20:55 UTC] No.45069290[source]▶
The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.
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betaby ◴[29 Aug 25 21:06 UTC] No.45069377[source]▶
> because of state backing and state objectives

MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.

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howdyhowdy123 ◴[29 Aug 25 21:38 UTC] No.45069698[source]▶
No it isn't
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SgtBastard ◴[29 Aug 25 21:54 UTC] No.45069866[source]▶
Technically you are correct but the commenter you’re responding to means that with the amount of Western Governments spend on MS products and services, the are a d facto (if not de jure) state backed enterprise.
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os2warpman ◴[30 Aug 25 01:26 UTC] No.45071136[source]▶
US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity.

In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.

I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.

Federal Spending: https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/dd77b7c3-663e-cb91-229...

Microsoft Annual Revenue: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/index.html

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1. hx8 ◴[30 Aug 25 17:01 UTC] No.45076162[source]▶
How much money have states and local governments spent on Microsoft products and services? How much money has Microsoft collected from companies that are providing products and services to US governmental agencies?

Government spending is not easy to track. This doesn't even begin to touch on non-monetary benefits Microsoft receives with government influence.

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2. howdyhowdy123 ◴[31 Aug 25 03:17 UTC] No.45080066[source]▶
Now you are really starting to bend over backwards. The claim was that MS was a state enterprise. It's still not even close.
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3. hx8 ◴[31 Aug 25 22:32 UTC] No.45087691[source]▶
I'm mostly adding context to the statistic that Microsoft makes 0.21% of its revenue from the federal government, and arguing against the sub-claim that government spending is easy to track.