I think this is what was predicted early on. There's no reason for FB to keep a separate entity based on high-end PC gaming, especially when its clear Oculus was bought to give Zuckerberg the "Facebook VR" he's been talking about for quite some time. I imagine the end game for Oculus is to be a branding for a mobile platform for VR. I'm not sure if its anyone's interest to keep it alive as a physical product, outside of visors you slip your phone into, and certainly not as a high-end gaming PC product.
Between HTC/Valve and the upcoming Windows Holographic/XboxVR and its upcoming tracked controllers and other competitors on the horizon, I'm not sure what room there is for an Oculus PC product. I also suspect even at the $599 pricing, they're losing money, especially if you consider the millions spent paying for exclusives or even funding full games for what ended up being a market of under 250,000 consumers after 6+ months of hard work and advertising, on top of years of hype. I imagine their projections were in the low millions, not couple hundred thousand.
Also my guess is that when VR takes on mobile (in the next 24 months) they will want it to be branded Facebook and not Oculus..
There was some executive shifting a few months back in VR at Facebook and they seem to be distinguishing already implying that "Desktop VR = Oculus" and that this is only a piece of Facebook's VR work.
They have been quietly deprioritizing the Oculus brand for a while now. They did a whole series of pop up stores before Christmas at various airports, trying to demo Gear VR. No mention of Oculus or Samsumg, 100% Facebook branding.
Before Christmas there was definitely a large Oculus branded popup in a few locations near me. I think it still makes sense for Oculus to remain a separate brand.
Being "just" a team changes internal politics a lot. You can have engineers re-assigned to other projects easily, you have to fight over internal resources, etc. Maybe it's not a problem at Facebook, but in many companies becoming just another team is the death knell for acquisitions.
Instagram has seen most of its success as "just a team" at Facebook. WhatsApp is probably the only acquisition Facebook made that didn't integrate fully.
Working on progressing VR is far more interesting than working on progressing Facebook (via VR).
And before anyone points out Facebook is interesting to work on because of the sheer size of the userbase the same argument could be said for working on McDonalds, Pepsi or any other low grade mass consumption product that's bad for you.
An ex coworker of mine worked at walmart in the 90's. Internet wasn't widespread, so they'd do real time inventory tracking via satellite uplink, trucks would be loaded and dispatched with whatever sold.
Now days, it doesn't sound quite so interesting. Back then it was impressive. There's so much extra tech available to everyone now, it's not nearly as tough as it was then.
I'm not much of a walmart fan for various reasons, but that sounded like pretty darn interesting work.
> low grade mass consumption product that's bad for you
Millions of people use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family. It's the platform that has powered trillions of meaningful social connections over the years. It's not junk food or sugar water.
Yes it is! It replaced hundreds of billios of meaningful social connections with trillions of shallow connections that most people would be better off keeping at arms length. Not that there's anything wrong with staying in touch with your highschool buddies, but seriously, do you need to laugh at every joke and fawn at every selfie they post?
There's a good reason why friendships would either grow stronger or grow appart over the years. It is called Dumbar Number.
Not sure I understand your thesis: are you trying to link "interesting" -> arbitrary "good/bad" utility designation, and use that reasoning to argue that progressing FB is not interesting?
It seems like a fallacy if I understand you correctly (which may/may not be the case):
If A -> B, and you claim -B, that doesn't mean -A.
e.g. If "VR is interesting -> good societal problems to solve" , then "bad societal problem" doesn't mean progressing FB isn't interesting.
> are you trying to link "interesting" -> arbitrary "good/bad" utility designation
No, just that VR isn't bad or mainstream yet so you have more opportunity to shape and steer it. Tough to do if you are chained to a goliath and it's needs.
" I look forward to building the future of immersive technology with Mark Zuckerberg, Brendan Trexler Iribe, Mike Schroepfer, and the visionaries in the Oculus team". Ouch!
I wouldn't take Palmer for a guy that's hurt by this. He became richer than his wildest dreams and doesn't have to take shit from anybody.
He's probably too busy trying to develop a healthy lifestyle that helps him keep the friends he wants to care for some corporate politics like this to register. Let them take the attention, he'll find another venue for his engineering itches.
> ...he'll find another venue for his engineering itches.
Will he?
I followed Palmer for a couple of years (on MTSB3D forums) before the kickstarter; it was his passion and dedication for hacking old/vintage HMDs that got me interested, and ultimately led me to supporting the KS.
He showed the kind of interest and dedication in DIY VR that I hadn't seen since the mid-1990s (and I only knew of one other individual at that time with the same kind of interest - DIY VR, heck VR in general outside of a few niche areas - was really dead).
DIY VR -was- his "engineering itch".
Sure - he got rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I don't think (or maybe I don't want to believe?) that was his endgame. From what I could see then, the endgame was to make VR something again - to make it "take off", to get it back to where it was (the hype?) in the 1990s. I'm not even sure if he wanted it commercialized - just more popular, and more people hacking on it. I think - or want to believe, maybe - that had the only thing that came out of the KS had been the DK1, that Palmer would be happy to have done only that. I don't think he ever intended it to become what it has, but I don't know him - maybe he did. From my perspective, which is skewed for a number of reasons (most of all because I don't know him personally), he never intended for it to explode like it has.
Personally, it surprised me greatly that it did. What I couldn't understand then (nor even now) is why there was an apparent pent-up demand for an HMD for the PC and gaming, yet virtually no one (outside of Palmer and one or two others) was hacking on HMDs? In the 1990s, there was a fairly vibrant DIY VR culture - a few well known books, an unfortunately short-lived magazine (PCVR) - but there were more than a handful of people hacking their own systems together, sharing stuff on the nascent internet and BBS's.
...then, it died off. But apparently there was still demand for it, but it seemed like nobody wanted to DIY their own systems, until after the Rift was announced. It isn't like there wasn't any information on the internet to get people started, plus the whole "maker movement" was strong. The software was all available to play with (game engines, 3d tools, etc). Yet - there wasn't any DIY movement. Until the Rift.
Strangely, though, the DIY VR movement is still fairly small; bigger than it was in 2012 and before, certainly - but it still seems like a lot of people don't want to DIY their own VR rig - most seems to only want to be consumers of the devices, not hackers/innovators - which is a bit strange to me.
Total tangent there - my apologies. As far as Palmer is concerned - well, I hope he continues with hacking VR - but I worry that the FB acquisition and the Oculus brand may dash that. I worry that he may have inadvertently killed the one thing he cared most about - hacking VR as his personal hobby - by making it big. I hope not, but I do wonder.
I'm not Palmer, but I know if I had the stark choice of choosing between being super-wealthy vs being able to freely work on and happily pursue my hobbies, I think I would ultimately kick myself if I chose the former.
If he can keep his emotions under control, he could just go on working on DIY HMDs, just having kicked off a whole chain of economy of scale improvements while having the ressources to buy what ever he desires to make it better. He doesn't have to think about BOM for his personal headset. 2 4K Screens? Sure, just get the ones from Sony's Xperia 5 Premium. Display Drivers?
He can pay for the right chips & people...
I just wonder where his non-compete clause starts and ends.
Smart hire - Barra is a great hardware evangelist, quite technical and was a great personality for Xiaomi that wasn't a typical "technical" person so could appeal to the masses. Oculus/FB really needs that.
Hugo Barra was previously a VP of product development in Google's Android division. He moved to Xiaomi a few years ago, and oversaw their international expansion. That was seen as a pretty big move, since it was probably the most significant poaching of a non-Chinese executive from US tech company by a Chinese tech company.
His resignation from Xiaomi was announced a few days ago - presumably in order to move to this role.
judging by success of xiaomis international expansion one would think he was fired, they are pretty much only in India and withdrawn from Brazil and Singapore, so his presence was utter failure and it's good riddance for Xiaomi
There's all what everyone else said plus one small thing more which some would call drama. It involves a love triangle between Hugo, Sergey Brin and a girl.
Some of these execs keep a high public profile and do a lot of press. It's part of the game at most large tech companies that aren't Apple. I personally find it really amusing that they get all this coverage in the tech press almost like they are NBA players, but it's to be expected when they have such a high public profile. Funnily enough, as accomplished as he is and despite the carefully curated PR, I remember him most for being the other part of that Sergey love triangle: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-r...
Sooo... I'm guessing this fits into what Brendan Iribe was talking about in his recent blog post, when he mentioned that the company wanted to "accelerate [their] roadmap"? From what others have mentioned it sounds like Hugo Barra is good at rapidly growing software and hardware platforms. That could potentially work well for Oculus and VR as a whole.
Hopefully for us ground-level users it means even more resources put into content development. Possibly new hardware revisions releasing earlier than had previously been planned as well?
I must admit I'm also hoping that any knowledge he has of the Chinese manufacturing industry contributes to smoother supply chains for Oculus products. No more parts shortages or shipping delays, pretty please. :)
Here's what he did say (his full post is here [1], if anyone's curious), which I think indicate culture, area, and distance from where he considers home as the factors affecting his health:
But what I've realized is that the last few years of living in such a singular environment have taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health. My friends, what I consider to be my home, and my life are back in Silicon Valley, which is also much closer to my family. Seeing how much I've left behind these past few years, it is clear to me that the time has come to return.
Specifics or misquotes aside, if you meant that the offer from Facebook was his primary reason for leaving, I can see that too, so won't disagree with the notion.
That's amusing in that the LA basin had an infamous "smog cap" for a good stretch of the XX century. Helped a lot getting those seminal strict emission laws in California, I believe.
Yep. LA in the 70s and early 80s was pretty bad. The irony that I'm escaping to here for the clean air! It is really good now, and china can really turn a corner in the future if they work hard enough at their pollution problem. Unfortunately, I just can't wait for that.
As someone who faced a similar decision two years ago (whether to go to MSRA or Google in SV for my sabbatical), the air pollution was one of the top three factors. I'd love to spend a year in Beijing, and the food is a bonus. But we decided it wouldn't be appropriate or fun to have a 3 year old inhaling that for 365 days. This was from experience - we speak to a week when she was two, and she'd have a coughing spell every time we left the hotel. But yes - many stresses. Family, not speaking the language very well, etc. In the case of seanmcdirmid, though, he's fluent and seems to like the food. :-). (welcome back, btw)
None of those were deal breakers for me personally. It really came down to the air coupled with a pregnant wife and soon to be newborn who didn't need to suffer through that.
Not sure why you were downvoted so much. China can be very hard to integrate with moving from the US. I had several coworkers there for year-long projects and a couple of them were miserable the entire time because the culture was too different for them (smog didn't bother them because they were indoors with good air filtration).
Not many foreigners have problems with Chinese food (the opposite isn't true, Chinese don't like western food as much). Beijing also does well on western-style for when you want it. Cooking is more annoying, you have to be extra careful when grocery shopping due to food quality issues, but variety isn't much of a problem (well, no western style sausage).
I don't believe that this was faked excuse. It is grueling to work in Chinese startup. In one of the articles about Xioami, he had a meeting in evening then flew out for a business meeting tomorrow morning, which means red-eye for him. This is not unheard in China. Work-life balance doesn't exist. US executives can't keep up with this demanding nature in Chinese work culture.
But Hugo seems to leave in good terms. His hiring and Xiaomi's well-received exposure to other markets in China coincided so it benefited both, company and him.
I'm on this site a lot and don't know who this is. It would help if someone actually provided context in a comment so readers can understand why this made it to the front page.
Your response to Google it is juvenile and doesn't add to the discussion.
I'm on this site a lot, I know who it is and I understand why it made to the front page. It would help everyone (you included) if you try Google first whenever someone (or something) you don't know is mentioned in a discussion. Even if you search for previous mentions of Hugo Barra on Hacker News, you'd learn that stories mentioning his leaving Xiaomi have made the frontpage in the last few days [1]. As a person who is on this site a lot, I'm surprised that you aren't familiar with him.
Let's not even get into what is (or isn't) juvenile at this point.
Just think - the time you spent writing that snarky response could just as easily have been spent writing, for example, "He worked at Google from 2008-13 and had various prominent positions relating to Android, then he took a role as VP at Xiaomi where he played a big role in turning that outfit into a company you've heard of".
> Just think - the time you spent writing that snarky response could just as easily have been spent writing...
Is it better to feed fish to a person, or teach them to catch one?
I admit that I was snarky as a response to the entitlement I sensed in his reply to the LMGTFY link. When I come across a discussion on Hacker News (or elsewhere) talking about things I don't know, I take a moment to Google first.
Because asking "who is he, and why should I care?" (which is what the original question amounts to) isn't contributing to the discussion much either.
A LMGTFY link is juvenile, full stop. It's not appropriate in any response. Condescension (which is what links to that site are) does not make a substantive comment.
If you Google his name, you get an article that he was a VP at Google. Put bluntly, who cares if a VP at Google and VP at Xiami moved to Facebook? Explain why this is relevant and not the equivalent of the magazines in grocery stores discussion who the latest celebrities are sleeping with.
> who cares if a VP at Google and VP at Xiami moved to Facebook?
Xiaomi's global vice president Hugo Barra is leaving the company [1] - 124 points, 87 comments
Hugo Barra is joining Facebook to lead virtual reality [2] - 99 points, 37 comments (as of the time of this posting)
So I guess some people DO care. Feel free to read through the discussion on both stories as to why those people care. If you're asking me why YOU should care, I don't think I can answer that question.
Also, sorry about the snark in my previous answer.
> Condescension (which is what links to that site are) does not make a substantive comment.
Neither does asking a question which is trivially answered by Googling. Why are you reserving your rage for the person trying to support community norms, and not for the person helplessly demanding that others explain to him what he could trivially discover on his own?
> A LMGTFY link is juvenile, full stop. It's not appropriate in any response.
It makes an important point that someone has asked a question beneath the threshold of questions which contribute positively to the community, and as such I'm happy that it exists, and happy when it's used. lmgtfy links are an act of community self-regulation, whether you think they're "douchey" or not, I'd rather have those links than your pointless screeds in opposition to them.
If you must rage, rage against the person whose time is apparently so much more valuable than the other members of this site that he demands his information be spoonfed to him by humans. Rage against the question "Can someone provide some context as to who this is and why it's newsworthy?" when substituted for the search query "who is hugo barra", which provides more information faster.
> > Condescension (which is what links to that site are) does not make a substantive comment.
> Neither does asking a question which is trivially answered by Googling.
Two wrongs don't make a right; that you see something as a violation of the norms of the site is a good reason to downvote or flag it, it's not a good reason to respond with your own violation of those norms, and should you choose such a violation, you should not expect it to be excused.
>Neither does asking a question which is trivially answered by Googling.
see my response to owebmaster.
>Why are you reserving your rage for the person trying to support community norms
It is not a community norm to condescend with instructions on how to use Google. The downvotes should make that clear.
>when substituted for the search query "who is hugo barra"
see my response to owebmaster.
I'm sorry if you have some personal connection with the guy or there was a cult of personality thing going with him at your job, but a VP of a company moving to a different company just isn't really normally newsworthy. That's why I asked in case I missed something about him changing the entire Facebook VR direction or something.
> It is not a community norm to condescend with instructions on how to use Google. The downvotes should make that clear.
It isn't now, and that's sad. But there was a time when this community valued straightforward, direct communication. If that time has passed, it's a loss for the community, and for you, whether you understand that or not.
There used to be a thing on usenet, when usenet was still a thing, of people saying "RTFM" or "RTFF" (the last "F" being FAQ). You still see it a bit on the web, but not nearly as much. Of course it was rude and condescending and incredibly unfriendly to newbies, and many people objected to it, but there were always some people who insisted on doing it, and defending it, because it was "straightforward, direct communication" (to use your phrase). In real life, of course, you'd never be so rude to someone - not a friend, not a stranger, not a customer, not a colleague - but for some reason basic politeness gets a bit muddled up on the Internet sometimes.
> You still see it a bit on the web, but not nearly as much. Of course it was rude and condescending and incredibly unfriendly to newbies
And it's also the reason I got to where I am today. It was only by being told directly to "RTFM" that I learned how to teach myself the things I needed to know, instead of relying on others to spoonfeed me information. I'm not defending it because it's something I want to do--I'm actually a very nice person--I'm defending it because it's something that benefits both the recipient and the community.
> you'd never be so rude to someone - not a friend, not a stranger, not a customer, not a colleague - but for some reason basic politeness gets a bit muddled up on the Internet sometimes.
My coworkers ask me frequently, "Does X do Y?" and I explain to them, "The easiest way to answer that question is to read the code, it's here." Or they ask me how something works and I say, "I don't know, but here's where I'd look to get that information." LMGTFY links are the online equivalent of those replies.
Invariably I've found that the people who object to LMGTFY links or "RTFM" responses or "Look it up" replies or "Try it and see" answers are fundamentally ruder than the ones who give those replies, because they feel entitled to a specific kind of remedial assistance and are too lazy to do the requisite research themselves. I know that's a broad net to cast, and I know that it catches my younger self far more often than I'd like to admit, but it's been my experience and I have no data to contradict it.
Ask why something is newsworthy while not doing at least a basic research to have a minimum understanding of the subject is very juvenile, and the way you did was disrespectful, now you are lecturing the guy about LMGTFY? Full stop.
>Ask why something is newsworthy while not doing at least a basic research to have a minimum understanding of the subject is very juvenile
Did it occur to you that I did Google his name? The results are littered with this same article and a wikipedia page that mentions he had VP roles at Google/Xiaomi but there was nothing about why this would be relevant to the HN crowd other than him being a VP at big tech companies. VPs at big tech companies move all of the time and they don't make the front page, so I asked who he was and why this was newsworthy.
How do you know "HN does"? Just because the story is on the front-page doesn't mean that. And even if the majority did know, what's wrong with someone who doesn't know asking for some context (where a Google search isn't necessarily easily going to provide that context)?
