Hardware

Market cap is one thing. It’s not like they have $3.2 trillion in cash. I understand that they don’t want to potentially miss out, but they have to expect a return and have at least modicum accountability on such initiatives. Moreso that Microsoft management doesn’t have a dual layer share structure like Zuck that essentially enables them to not be responsible to shareholders.

True, i guess we could also look at other numbers instead of market cap. here are their most recent results: In the last quarter alone they had 22 billion net income. If this article for example is correct with their $13.75 billion that microsoft invested, then we are talking less than 2 months of profit.

However i am not sure if that is the right metric either. If i remember correctly they didn't use cash to pay for their stake either, but instead gave openAI compute credits to train their model on Microsofts cloud. At least for some of it.

In any case as the article above also mentions the whole ownership structure is pretty complicated, but unless the AI bubble bursts and openAI's valuation drops, their investment so far has grown on paper.

Have you read about some of the internal discussions on metaverse in FB? They didn’t want to use their own products for meetings because it was a hassle and it was easier to just do a video/audio conference call.

They’ve spent over $46 billion on metaverse initiatives - can you point to any promising products or viable use cases that have come out of this initiative? Surely there has to be something, I understand it takes time, but after 3 years and $46 billion, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have something to show.

Yeah, i've read some articles on the topic. Their quest headsets are pretty solid and the Orion glasses they recently showcased seem like a step in the right direction. But i do share your criticism that it is hard to see where all that money went. Which i also tried to convey above by qualifying my opinion with "in theory i can see the appeal " and " (and i still don’t quite understand where all that money goes)"