> A good hockey player don't skate to where the puck is.
I'm not a hockey player.
> He skates to where it will be.
The time scale for hockey players is seconds, not years.
This is such a useless cliché.
Most developers have very limited resources. Apple can afford to invest in pipe dreams (reportedly they spent $billions working on the now cancelled car project), but I certainly can't.
> 1975: Don't bother writing MicroSoft BASIC. The customer base is miniscule.
You're cherry-picking a single success, with the benefit of hindsight. How about listing all of the nascent technologies from 1975? It's likely that many of them flopped, and investing in them was a waste.
> if your company, or its leadership, lack vision for the future and only invest in the present
I am my company, a sole proprietor with very limited resources. I do invest in the future to some extent, but I can't invest in every possible future. The Vision Pro future does not look particularly promising.
Besides, you don't need to be first to be successful. I certainly wasn't the first to any platform, not even close. The thing about hockey is, there's only one puck on the ice. And it's a zero-sum game, one winner and one loser. But that's not even remotely true of tech.
I quoted where you violated the guidelines: "If you can't grok an analogy, that's on you." That's a personal insult. Could you please quote where you think I violated the guidelines?
> News that Google would be closing down Stadia was a big surprise for everyone, including the developers making games for the platform.
Now, Apple can probably pull off a lot of stuff, but with how quickly products get killed nowadays, sometimes you might end up betting on a future that will never come to pass.
Apple's history is to pick a strategic product direction and then continue to iterate on their hardware and software for that product year after year.
For instance, Apple Watch.
Throwing products over the wall and killing them if they don't prove to be an immediate success is more if a Google/Microsoft thing.
Although it's fair to point out that Microsoft did at least update HoloLens hardware once before they killed it.
The issue with both HoloLens and Vision Pro is the nearly identical price point. You aren't going to see mass market sales figures until you can reach mass market price points.
It's a risk / reward tradeoff; can you as an individual or a company afford to lose on the bet that Vision will become successful enough, AND that your app will become successful? There's much safer bets for anyone out there at the moment.
I mean… I think Apple hasn’t totally missed VR, and is still the only company that seems to have much of a chance of making it work…
But, a good hockey player doesn’t skate in the direction that absolutely nobody else is heading, somewhere that might even be outside the rink (in the sense that we haven’t really shown if a good UI for VR can actually be created, yet, so it might not even be a possible “part of the game,” so to speak).
I think VR is not a serious business for Meta, just something Zuck is doing for fun. Why not, rich enough to goof off, right? They spent $4b to make $400M on their headsets.
A better business model would probably be to pay people a couple hundred dollars to take their headsets. At least that might result in some install base.
A good hockey player don't skate to where the puck is. He skates to where it will be.