John Carmack, gaming industry legend and one of the most respected leaders in the virtual reality industry, recently gave a scathing indictment of Meta, a San Francisco-based virtual reality start-up. At the Oculus Connect 3 event, Carmack said that Meta “constantly self-sabotage” their own VR efforts and pointed out that this appears to be intentional.
Carmack was referring to the difficulties encountered by Meta when attempting to ship its virtual reality headset, the Meta 2. The most recent and prominent of these has been the departure of their former CEO, Meron Gribetz, in August 2016. This was just one more in a series of delays and misfortunes that have prevented Meta from shipping their product.
Carmack’s accusation centers around the idea that executives at Meta have made certain decisions out of fear instead of looking ahead to the future. He believes this has prevented them from capitalizing on the success of the VR industry. For instance, he pointed to initiatives like Meta’s software platform, which he believes was meant to address the problem of headset fragmentation rather than further future potential.
At the end of the day, Carmack believes that they would have been successful if Meta had taken a different approach to their projects. He believes that Meta should have invested in open-source software and focused more on creating standards and universal features for VR. If this had been the case, he believes that the company would have achieved the success it was striving for instead of falling into the trap of “self-sabotage.”
It remains to be seen how Meta will address Carmack’s claims and move forward in the face of these disruptions. But with Carmack’s words in mind, hopefully, they will be able to make better decisions in the future and make great strides in the virtual reality industry.
The complete note can be found here.
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