> When the internet came about, the initial vision for retail was that you would have these avatars that would go to a shelf for a sweater and then walk over to the cash register and buy it. It was just stupid and didn’t make any sense.
That does sound like a very dot-com bubble idea. Wonder if Metaverse is also a bubble indicator.
I was working for Steve Kirsch at Infoseek during this time, and I remember, too, laughing at the people who thought this was the way people would shop. And all the hype about VRML at the Web conferences at this time!
I pointed out to some of the starry-eyed believers that people have been shopping happily from catalogs for 100+ years, and that would translate well to the web. No 3D required. And we were a _search_ company! You would think someone would have posited that _searching_ may be a better model than _browsing_ for some things.
Sure, the ability to spin something to get a 360 view (in a 2D browser) of something once you've seen it on a 2D page has some utility, but 4 orthogonal views handle that well enough too.
I can't imagine I'd ever don a pair of 3D glasses to buy another pair of Levis.
Perhaps the rebranding was timed to take some political pressure off $FB. Or perhaps it is "Cortez burning the ships" to focus the efforts of the entire company so there is no going back.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 33.6 ms ] threadThat does sound like a very dot-com bubble idea. Wonder if Metaverse is also a bubble indicator.
I pointed out to some of the starry-eyed believers that people have been shopping happily from catalogs for 100+ years, and that would translate well to the web. No 3D required. And we were a _search_ company! You would think someone would have posited that _searching_ may be a better model than _browsing_ for some things.
Sure, the ability to spin something to get a 360 view (in a 2D browser) of something once you've seen it on a 2D page has some utility, but 4 orthogonal views handle that well enough too.
I can't imagine I'd ever don a pair of 3D glasses to buy another pair of Levis.
Why announce something… some time in the future?
Perhaps the rebranding was timed to take some political pressure off $FB. Or perhaps it is "Cortez burning the ships" to focus the efforts of the entire company so there is no going back.