>We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta
>...Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and laptops.
Hate to break it to you, but if you don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is actively trying to create VR devices that are general-purpose productivity devices aimed at replacing PCs and laptops, you haven't been watching some of their recent videos about the new headsets and prototype headsets they're working on. He very much is aiming for that market with future devices (not the Quest 2).
Also he's described their Project Cambria headset as intended for productivity, as in the following article:
"What’s different about Project Cambria?
The most important description we’ve received about Project Cambria comes from The Information; according to the publication, Meta employees have alternately described the headset as a “laptop for the face” or a “Chromebook for the face.” It’s a device Zuckerberg hopes people will use to get work done rather than being aimed primarily at gamers as with previous headsets."
It's hard to focus on multiple things at once, and we're skeptical that the bureaucratic forces in play at a large company like Meta will allow them to do a good job at making their gaming platform also one that people actually want to work in.
"We don't think they're competent enough to be a competitor" is a bad way to judge whether you're competing with someone. It's like Apple laughing at the IBM PC.
Just want to clarify that I would never characterize Zuckerberg or Meta as "incompetent". Quite the contrary. I would instead more characterize the situation as Paul Graham did in one of his essays[1]:
> A lot of startups worry "what if Google builds something like us?" Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about-- not even Google. The people at Google are smart, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.
To be honest, Meta seems pretty afraid of going out of business if their metaverse-pitch ends up failing - in fact, I'm pretty sure the whole metaverse push just happened because FB was (is) loosing ground fast.
I think Zuckerberg is afraid of his core beliefs breaking, that a man has a face and his name. None of existing VR platforms are made that way and are successful at the same time.
What you're seeing: a Meta headset tethered to a laptop over WiFi running Immersed.
What you're not seeing: a standalone VR headset running a VR Desktop OS natively with bleeding edge pixel density (i.e., like the Simula One).
We understand that Meta has some cool tools in its app store which can be used to get a feel for VR computing. But analogously, you could also purchase word processors for early gaming consoles too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtariWriter
Our view is that dedicated VR computing devices are what the market actually needs.
> Our view is that dedicated VR computing devices are what the market actually needs.
My view is the market needs a product that does not require an internet connection, Facebook account, Microsoft account, windows PC, or equivalent restriction-ware.
Is it really fair to call 8 bit Atari computer line (on which AtariWriter runs) gaming consoles? They had built-in keyboards, had built-in BASIC, would let you attach peripherals like a disc drive or a printer and let you program in assembly. And could be expanded with RAM expansions and 80 column cards. Of course the later XEGS blurred the line but it's also a bit like suggesting the Amiga or Macintosh were not computers because of the Commodore CD32 and Apple Pippin were a thing.
A bit, but not much. Our tethered option is for people who want to connect to beefier hosts because they need the extra GPU power (or want to use our headset's high pixel density for gaming purposes). We've sold very few of them though. Our primary offering is our standalone unit.
Definitely some demo-only things going on there. Pass through keyboard is different, and this person just happens to go in to a meeting where the table is in the same orientation and size as the one in his house/office?
We're working on camera boards now for our AR Mode (it will likely be featured in our an engineering update next week). After our boards are finished (~2-4 weeks), we'll be able to integrate them into our review units for our first integrated camera tests.
Imagine if during the Microsoft antitrust case, they subpoenaed Apple, Compaq, Oracle, Sony and some small startups for their entire short- and long-term business strategy documentation. Oh, and all their user metrics and any telemetry.
In that case, "On September 18, 1998, believing that certain statements from Netscape employees reported in Lessons offered succor for its defense, Microsoft subpoenaed the professors' notes, tape recordings and transcripts of interviews, and correspondence with interview subjects. "
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-1st-circuit/1179769.html
>It's hard to focus on multiple things at once, and we're skeptical that the bureaucratic forces in play at a large company like Meta will allow them to do a good job at making their gaming platform also one that people actually want to work in.
The problem with your assertion is that you over count how many multiple things Meta has to do. What will make for a very good gaming VR Headset will also be a very good professional and productivity headset.
The key aspects which Mark Zuckerberg laid out personally in the recent VR Prototypes unveil pretty universally hit both targets. Comfortable light weight headsets with incredible fidelity is desirable for all VR applications. Not just gaming.
My bet is Mark is going to burn a LOT of money, fail to get mass adoption, cancel the project, and lay the design team off.
But who knows! Maybe we’ll all be taking work meetings in MetaLife this time next year! Just make sure you login to your meeting 5 minutes early to preview the new season of BigBrother and score an extra 60 seconds of microphone mute time!
Because Meta has been selling one of the best VR Headsets for the money thus far. I'd really recommend checking out their VR Headsets announcement [1]. Maybe VR will never actually go anywhere software-wise, but it's clear that the team at Meta has a good understand of the problems of current headsets and what would be necessary to make a generational leap in immersiveness.
I'm certain there will be markets for it.
>My bet is Mark is going to burn a LOT of money, fail to get mass adoption, cancel the project, and lay the design team off.
I don't think they're going to cancel it. It's very much a hail marry here. The Facebook phone was a massive flop and the cumulative result of failing to have their own hardware platform was Apple killing their mobile ads business. I think Meta will do everything in it's power to own it's own hardware so that whatever their business model is, no competitor could just kill it with a flip of a switch.
ai driven ads that know exactly what your meeting will be about with virtual copies of the employees cheering the product presented and close ups of the CEO (30 years younger) making a thinking face.
> I don’t want to go too far given I’ve only tried Workrooms out once, but this feels like something real. And, just as importantly, there is, thanks to COVID, a real use case. Of course companies will need to be convinced, and hardware will need to be bought, but that’s another reason why the work angle is so compelling: companies are willing to pay for tools that increase productivity to a much greater extent than consumers are.
I’m a lot less important than Ben but just wanted to +1 that it’s pretty compelling use case once experiencing it. It’s not there yet, mostly due to resolution issues and long term comfort issues, but it’s close enough to show it’s absolutely viable.
I bought the quest2 since it was cheap as a pandemic entertainment device and while I never play it, I regularly wish for a VR monitor (eg a high res nreal air)
A lot of Quest games can actually turn audio into mouth movements on an avatar. I play Walkabout Mini Golf with my friends a lot and it's incredible how natural the mouth movements seem to match my friends' speech. I'll turn to them complaining about par on a hole and I'll see them speak in response.
The new Quest headsets are supposed to have some features for facial expression tracking for exactly this reason. But yeah, no doubt there's still a ways to go for the experience to be worthwhile.
I think that Meta actually has facial tracking in one of their VR Headsets. They published a bunch of preliminary demos of stuff in video form a few months back, it's worth checking out.
> Consider that Atari tried to compete with office PCs in the early 80s with their 8-bit family, and failed
I don't think that's very accurate. The Atari ST had a pretty good following compared to personal computers of the time much like the Amiga... The fact is that most computer companies from back then did not survive far beyond the decade but they had their time. So it's not really accurate to say they failed when Acorn, Amiga, Amstrad...etc, all "failed", in that they didn't produce more than a handful of unique and fairly incompatible computers with no clear future, but that had a market and sold with success in their time frame none the less.
I don’t think he meant the computers as a whole were unsuccessful, but the bid to enter the business sector was. The common consensus is they failed because Atari was so strongly associated with games. I assume there are possibly greater reasons, but it is true Tramiel and others tried the pivot and it failed.
"Do a good job" is different from intent to compete. Horizon Workrooms, keyboard passthrough, and multi-app support screams non-entertainment functionality. And that's just what's been released pre-Quest Pro...
As a very nearsighted programmer suffering from increasing age-related farsightedness, I often fantasize about a VR headset that would allow me to comfortably focus (say 6 feet away while wearing contacts) on a huge virtual tmux session for coding.
I don't know if this is even remotely a possibility but it sure would beat dealing with constant CSS (can't see s*t)
IIRC, Nreal Light is 2 m focus distance. Crisp 1080p. Weight/fit... I'd perhaps diy a hat or strap for long-duration use, depending on face shape. Reddit suggests newer Nreal Air is 4 m.
Prescription inserts (we're working with vendors on this) are possible, and the focus distance of our headset (and most headsets, I think) is in that region.
And there are plenty of instances of companies that have gone under when a big parent company decides to incorporate your business as a 'feature' in part of their big monster product.
I'm not saying it's going to definitely happen and the company is doomed or anything, it's certainly possible that SimulaVR will come out on top for productivity devices (or peacefully coexist as an alternative alongside Meta's offering). But it shouldn't ignore what Meta is doing either, especially when they're actively saying they're moving into their turf.
At the very least, it looks like Meta will put up a helluva fight.
Of course anything Meta does is a bit worrisome. I just don't think we're in the same niche-- IMO Meta is fundamentally built on data collection, and VR is just a side effect.
Unless Meta decides to abandon that, I think we'll have a niche.
> IMO Meta is fundamentally built on data collection
Isn’t their whole Metaverse thing a gamble to get away from that? Why does data collection prevent creating a good VR experience. If anything it should align goals well (spend as much time in VR as possible, so as much in VR as possible). Besides, most DataCollection companies offer CollectionFree enterprise contracts… which is where the money for this probably is.
(Btw I’m a huge fan of this sort of product and I hope a respectful company wins.. I’m just skeptical that meta can’t fund their way to success. )
> Isn’t their whole Metaverse thing a gamble to get away from that?
Many of us think Meta is trying to gain as much market as they can early, so they can leverage eye tracking and mm wave tech for very invasive biometric collection and ad targeting in the future. Reasonable minds can disagree on that.
Pretty sure Zuck has said outright that the goal is to own the economy of the metaverse… selling digital stuff and digital places with digital ads and (digital?) media.
It could be a gambit to track your eyes but that seems even harder with worse reward than taking a 30% cut as the next App Store.
> It could be a gambit to track your eyes but that seems even harder with worse reward than taking a 30% cut as the next App Store.
No these are the same thing. Tracking pupil response to stimuli tells advertisers how a human is reacting to what they see. It lets Meta sell a platform to advertisers where they can target humans in particular emotional states, or at certain times when that individual is more likely to make a purchase.
What? They’re doing VR because they think it’s the basis for the next general computing platform, and owning the platform gives you unlimited access to the user’s data. And in VR, that data includes the user’s gaze, height, physical fitness, high resolution 3D model of their gaming area, and other inferred or measured biometrics. As well as every virtual strip club, naughty video, and indiscreet personal message.
This is similar to saying "Facebook is fundamentally built on data collection, and social networking is just a side effect." Technically true, but not much consolation for all the social networks that didn't go all in on advertising and perished.
Wish you the best of luck either way, this is an exciting area and more competition is great. They definitely are competition though.
I am failing to see a separate niche here. There are only so many ways you can break down office productivity focus and still have a market to support you. Your team should accept the facts and stop trying to wiggle out of competing with your--frankly--main rival in this space. It doesn't do any justice to avoid this truth. Honestly, I'd be shocked if you weren't already closely monitoring their work and its reaction in the market.
I think Meta's strategy was the right one. The only execs who would even consider adopting a virtual work model would be gamers who are already familiar with the tool. Gaming was their way to get in the minds of their potential next phase enterprise customers.
I totally disagree with this. Early gaming consoles (~70s) took off roughly a decade before early PCs (~80s). Yet many of the people who bought the latter had little interest in the former. They were two completely distinct markets (with some, but clearly not extensive overlap).
We've had many people tell us (often on Hacker News actually) that they're not super interested in VR gaming, but are very interested in VR computing.
(I myself am one of these people BTW; despite working in VR for half a decade now, I have almost no interest in VR gaming, and wouldn't be interested in the field were it not for its enormous potential as a new thinking tool).
My point is that interest in sci-fi technologies and having some interest (prior or current) in gaming are highly overlapping demographics. Many games explore interactions with future technologies.
Additionally, from a technical perspective of an executive who is looking into VR, "if a headset can provide the fidelity to play games then that would mean it can likely do X and Y complex things my business does"
Enterprise loves data collection so that's really a perfect fit for their next phase customer base. That's why I think the Meta account system was important for them to get done pre Quest Pro launch (and significantly early too so any issues are worked out before enterprise demos start)
As someone who used to work there, I would be significantly more afraid.
VR there has never been exclusively about gaming nor has gaming been the overall goal of VR since their acquisition. The way they talked about it back in the day was, if I recall accurately, that they were focused on three pillars: "The metaverse", "The overlay", and "The future of work". Social presence, real-life AR metadata, and expanding the screens and capabilities of working professionals, respectively.
The direction of their research and implementation has, at least to my knowledge, been oriented literally towards creating a new category of general purpose productivity devices and admitting as much in a very public blog post is a pretty big own-goal if the idea is to try to avoid the subpoena by distinguishing yourselves (assuming you're speaking on behalf of SimulaVR).
I think this is mixing up the mythology of Zuckerberg with the reality. There's no indication that he is exclusively or even primarily driven by money or power.
Go watch any long-form interview with him, such as with Lex Fridman. It becomes rather clear that he wants to be more like how Steve Jobs is seen by the wider public: as an innovator and pioneer, not as a power-hungry moneymaker.
He isn’t doing a great job at that. I see him as a rather analytical CEO. Nothing of the charisma or clarity of ideas that Steve Jobs had. Steve Jobs was rather ruthless when it came to quality (source : Guy Kawasaki) and no idea how Zuckerberg is irl, but my impression it isn’t favorable.
What I am trying to say is, with how Facebook is managed isn’t at all like Apple.
It's a very different experience to how we currently consume media, and I am not really sure it has mass appeal even with some kind of perfect execution. I am prepared to be totally wrong mind you.
It's an incredible tool and way to engage with virtual worlds, but the question we should be asking isn't "Is VR technology good enough" which I think people get stuck on. Really the question is "Does everyone want to be in a virtual world regularly?" and my intuition having spent a good amount of time in VR is that the answer to that is actually no.
I love video games, so much so that I even try to make them. I spend many hours playing in virtual worlds, but I very, very rarely want to use VR. I'm the perfect candidate for the technology, and it's honestly mindblowing when I do use it, but it's just not a casual experience. Even if we had the perfect, unobtrusive and lightweight technology, you are still choosing to disconnect from your current environment and spend time fully engaged with a different world in a way that games and TV don't. That can be really exhausting.
Personally, I think that both TV and movies are going to be driving VR adoption. The Netflix of VR movies could be huge if they were able to offer the right content. A fully virtual theatre that gets new releases could also be big. The edge that VR had in these areas is that it essentially gives you a private theatre that you can enjoy with your friends and family. Leveraging a social network so that you can deliver notifications like “X is currently watching Y. Click to join” would be big. People already kind of do this with watch parties and discord.
I love VR, but it is terrible for things like watching movies. Imagine sitting on your couch and putting on a movie. How often do you do that? If it is more often than 'once in a while', are you actually sitting and watching it intently the entire timee? Are you eating, or drinking anything, or petting your cat or dog, or snuggling on the couch with your SO or kids? You can't do that with a VR headset on because you can't see anything else at all. If you grab for a glass you have to switch to pass-through mode and back again, or take off the headset. You also can't do anything but look at the screen.
It isn't really something that people want to do.
Exceptions of course would be to do it with someone remotely, like a friend or a family member -- it is a good way to potentially 'hang out' with people who aren't physically there. But the same caveats apply.
> Exceptions of course would be to do it with someone remotely, like a friend or a family member -- it is a good way to potentially 'hang out' with people who aren't physically there. But the same caveats apply.
An increasing number of relationships are happening purely remotely. My company went fully remote due to the pandemic and I've started building working relationships, and yes a friendship even, with new employees completely remotely. And I'm a millenial who remembers a distinct separation between the online and offline (and the modem tones lol). (Though I was a very online kid and have made many internet friends over the years.)
Younger relatives of mine don't see as strong a separation and they have friends who they made in primary school that they stayed in touch with despite families moving a long ways away because of how easy remote communication is these days; when I was a kid moving locales meant a new set of friends. It's this demographic and this world that I think is poised to enter VR experiences en masse. Gen X and older Millenials probably still have too strong concepts of "offline" and "online" (and usually prioritize "offline" over "online") to break this barrier down (as you say, a quintessential part of the "offline" experience is snuggling with your dog or an SO) but I'm pretty confident that younger folks won't see this distinction as pronounced. I might be wrong of course.
> younger folks won't see this distinction as pronounced
But they will see it as pronounced because it is pronounced, for all the reasons mentioned.
People love real spaces, real objects, real venues, smells, and atmosphere. The physical characteristics of friends and strangers, from subtle facial cues to outrageous clowning around. In VR, all that is stifled or non-existent; substituted with digitally representation, crafted by unknown processes. Cold origins. Black boxes.
> enter VR experiences en masse
Really? I wouldn't bet on it. The warmth of remote communication you mentioned, is coming from that which we already have. Phones, screens, coffee next to the laptop, simple face to face chats on the screen of your choice. Show me your new house! Cool, walk around carrying phone. Not a VR headset!
Strapping on a headset and embracing rendered distractions while you communicate? I don't see that happening en masse. You'd need to literally get real before VR takes off. Each headset commanding a tiny 360 drone camera, flying wherever you like without incident. See you at Burning Man! From your couch. In this impossible "RR" (remote reality?) future, a typical music festival or live event would have both real people and a bunch of VR drones - somehow inter-mingling, silent without collision, without any issues. Until then, VR is a device strapped to your head, dishing out pre-renders. Your real cat limits the VR experience, and into the bottom drawer goes your headset, right next to the DJI drone you got for Xmas.
I realize you disagree with my take, but if you want to understand it at least, I would suggest trying to steelman my position. The examples you bring up are probably the absolute worst cases for VR and if you judge a technology by its worst cases then nobody would use a technology. Judge an argument by its strongest interpretation, not its weakest.
> People love real spaces, real objects, real venues, smells, and atmosphere. The physical characteristics of friends and strangers, from subtle facial cues to outrageous clowning around. In VR, all that is stifled or non-existent; substituted with digitally representation, crafted by unknown processes. Cold origins. Black boxes.
This same argument could have been used to argue against the Internet, against using the Web to replace real services (how can you replace the minutiae of human voice interaction with a screen??), against the mobile revolution even. Yet mobile phones are here to stay and even developing countries with bad public infrastructure rely heavily on mobile phones to stay connected. Overly broad philosophical arguments never have explanatory power. I think you can make the argument that the experience of VR would make it too cumbersome to use no matter the streamlining, but to attribute some mystical quality to physical connections neglects the sheer growth of the internet, web, and mobile that are extant.
> See you at Burning Man! From your couch. In this impossible "RR" (remote reality?) future, a typical music festival or live event would have both real people and a bunch of VR drones - somehow inter-mingling, silent without collision, without any issues. Until then, VR is a device strapped to your head, dishing out pre-renders. Your real cat limits the VR experience, and into the bottom drawer goes your headset, right next to the DJI drone you got for Xmas.
It's not like mobile phones took over every aspect of our society. My relatives that kept in touch with their young school friends throughout their lives over mobile phones also as adults meet up with their friends IRL. Friends that met partners while playing WoW live with their partners and have started families with them. This isn't an all-or-nothing proposition and suggesting so seems absurd given the prior art we have of digital technologies.
If VR becomes a default way to communicate and collaborate, that's all it will take to "win".
> This same argument could have been used to argue against the Internet
No because we didn't have anything else before the internet other than landline phones, one per household.
In my comment where I said "we already have it", that's the key point. VR is not an incredible shift like mobiles and internet were, and yet your last line flirts with the word "default". Of course it will be popular and clever, and will do well for the special times we want VR by placing a thing on our heads. But like drone cameras, VR will not elbow out the default cameras we already have that work better in most cases.
> but to attribute some mystical quality to physical connections neglects the sheer growth of the internet
Some mystical quality? You say that like "meh, real life"! The internet isn't trying to be "reality", it's just the internet. VR literally has the word reality in its name. Obviously comparisons will be made to actual reality for technologies that use the same word in the name.
> Obviously comparisons will be made to actual reality for technologies that use the same word in the name.
You are getting distracted by a naming convention. If we called VR something else, without the word "reality" those points don't even make any sense.
VR is not a reality replacement. Like all technology it augments reality.
(I hope my intentionally interesting word choice of "augments reality" doesn't distract you from what the sentence means. As with VR, the meanings of words interpreted as a phrase, vs. interpreted individually, often mean related but different things.)
Virtual reality will be judged based on its own use cases. Given the ergonomics of VR hardware and software are rapidly advancing, seemingly compelling new use cases are being identified with interesting beta's and preliminary-shipping demos, and we haven't even seen a platform that delivers seamless navigation or co-navigation across apps (as the web provides for sites), I would say the potential has hardly been tapped.
This sounds like an argument against TV or movies or the internet. Those things are also substitutes for real life experiences and yet people still spend huge amounts of time with them. VR doesn’t have to preclude the rest of the world. It’s an addition to it. When you don’t have the money or the time or the energy to go out it’s nice to be able to jump into something like VR and have fun with others from the comfort of your home.
If we had to strap our TV to our heads, we'd gravitate to something that didn't require that.
As it stands a "TV" can be a screen of many different sizes and configurations, it can even be a projected image. VR can't be anything but a headset strapped to our heads. That's the point I was making about it's uptake woes... It's obviously fun and will have plenty of users dipping their toe in, or should I say customers, but "en masse" was the point I was replying to and doubting.
What I was trying to communicate in my original post was that VR is not like those mediums on this specific point. It completely removes you from the environment, it provides a lot more immersion but then also takes a lot more commitment to dive into. It only takes me 30 seconds to get the headset on and be in a game, so that's not the issue, it's just an entirely different level of engagement. I almost feel a little guilty when I use VR, because it feels like I'm forgoing the real world. I don't feel that way about games or movies.
That’s odd because I have the opposite feeling. I almost never play regular computer games anymore because I see it as a time sink. I also avoid watching things by myself for the same reason. Playing a VR game or spending time with others in VR feels much more rewarding because I’m using my body instead of sitting in a chair and I feel more engaged with the people I talk to when they are embodied in an avatar and we are present in a space together vs just hearing their voice through headphones.
Well, I do watch movies with others in VR on a fairly regular basis and it’s great. Could be better, headsets need to be more comfortable and pass through has room for improvement but both of those things are on the very near horizon.
Look at the cambria demos, they’re already doing mixed reality by blending the room with the experience. No reason that can’t be used to put your couch, coffee table and SO in the virtual theatre. You also have to consider that a lot of the younger people using these won’t have dogs or kids to worry about.
Sure, it has use cases, but the fact is that something like a phone, or a tablet, or a TV can be used and not used within a fraction of a second as required. Putting on a headset is like going to a movie theater -- it is fine for occasions but it isn't something I can see people wanting to do regularly.
You are thinking with present limitations and I mostly agree.
I can actually take a drink with the headset on but the bulk does make it odd. But these next gen headsets are much more compact. Check out the vive flow, and then the nvidia prototype holographic displays.
If I live in a small apartment or dorm or just don’t have a tv in my room and want to watch anything then that becomes a better choice than holding my extremely heavy iPhone or iPad very soon.
I look forward to the improvements -- like I said, I love VR.
My issue is specifically that it has great use cases (which we have gone over, like gaming and immersion) and mediocre use cases (like socializing) and poor use cases (like replacing a computer for general and work use).
Big leaps in technology that shifted paradigms have been catalyzed by a killer app (ex. spreadsheets for desktop computing) or have been incredibly obvious (ex. long distance real-time communication for telegraph/phone).
Trying to force a technology onto the larger population without one of these things by only advancing the technology itself is not only a waste of money, but tends to backfire and set the public against it for a non-trivial period of time.
I have able to buy Quest 2s locally for a pittance in 'like new' condition because people get them based on the promise of some general utility and end up realizing they are only great at gaming and media consumption, and a lot of people just don't want to wear a headset for those activities.
But what does that mean for movies and games, the type of media most people are likely to consume while in VR? You wouldn't really want your reality mixed with a game you're playing, with exceptions being AR games which vastly limits the possible experiences. It might help for movies, but it also kind of defeats the benefits of VR if you're just watching a flat screen in an AR version of your room.
I can actually see something like that taking off if VR eyewear becomes quite fashionable, and not just in the sense that it looks good, but it becomes trendy to use it.
I think it's more to be used in the home with other vr users online, the pro is supposed to introduce features such as eye, mouth and emotion tracking to make avatars more "real"
I think you're right, but I disagree that he has no choice — he can find some other “moonshot”. Pushing VR (or AR) seems like something he thinks will play well with the stock holders; and if he is as skeptical as some of us then he's kind of playing them for rubes.
Hearing them describe their own product as “Chromebook for the face” just reconfirms my suspicious that this is a doomed product.
My bet would be more on AR than VR, and maybe it's not the next big thing but the big thing after the next one.
But that's fine for Meta. Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp might all be running out of growth, but they are all big enough that Meta can afford to invest in something that will only pay off in a decade or two, as long as the payoff is big enough. Gaming-VR headsets are just a good way to get the technology into people's hands right now, and iterate on it.
Even if it’s the next big thing you know a better iHeadset will follow months later and be a much better product with less privacy and data theft built in.
Except it will have no games, cost $4k and will probably be difficult to port anything to. Great for Apple’s current mbpro market but ignored by everyone else.
Apple shipped support for WebXR in iOS 16. OpenXR is pretty good standarď and they would greatly benefit from supporting it. Which I think will happen.
(My guess is that Unity (& Blender) will have an on-stage demo when the headset comes out. Unity: “just tick this box and your game will run on Reality Pro”)
>> >...Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and laptops.
> Hate to break it to you, but if you don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is actively trying to create VR devices that are general-purpose productivity devices aimed at replacing PCs and laptops, you haven't been watching some of their recent videos about the new headsets and prototype headsets they're working on. He very much is aiming for that market with future devices (not the Quest 2).
It sounds like they're saying that Meta doesn't currently sell anything that competes with what they're currently selling, and the info you give doesn't seem to contradict that. I'd question the premise that releasing a marketing video for a product that doesn't exist counts as being "in competition". They might be in competition in the future, but it doesn't seem like they are right now.
This is a weird take considering that simulavr is still taking preorders and doesn't plan to ship until 2023. They both have non-existent products right now
Or maybe I'm wrong and they are already selling a product? I didn't see it on the website.
There is a segment that uses the virtual desktop with the oculus quest 2 quite extensively, so you still have that argument with their current lineup of devices IMO.
If I am not wrong, this is an antitrust suit, meaning it is about what they are selling, not what they are developing. If the product has been launched, there literally cannot be a monopoly.
They are both selling VR headsets. Claiming they are not competitors is like trying to claim electric cars are not in competition with gas powered cars because they are different technology.
Well.... I mean... we do consider trucks and cars to be different markets. And they are often the same technology. Same for passenger trucks to long haul trucks. Fundamentally same technology, but very different markets.
Maybe I've just been on a too-long coding stretch, but speaking for myself, it's just really unsavory to read so much "red/blue"-style sloganism around the big tech companies. Obviously I'm biased because I worked for one, and so I saw up close the process that produces the decisions that seem to routinely generate comment threads with people comparing Google/FB/MSFT/etc. to e.g. "Satan".
It's just not that simple folks: and a hallmark of why this forum is great is that we tackle "not that simple" with a relentless curiosity rather than 1-bit generalizations.
I routinely whack these megacorps for their shady dealings. But this "Marg bar Āmrikā" shit is an unflattering look for such a thoughtful community and it ignores that huge parts of this community are a direct personal object of very nasty remarks made "in general" on a fairly daily basis.
People are quite pleased to enjoy the corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps: try saying something bad about Kubernetes if you don't believe me.
It's not a 1-bit thing, and Hacker News is Hacker News because when people (and I've been that guy) throw rocks, we demand better.
I agree, and just want to reiterate what was written in the article: we genuinely feel no animosity towards Meta and its gaming headsets. We don't even feel animosity that they have leveraged their economies of scale to provide them very cheaply to consumers (something we aren't able to do yet[1]). We just disagree with their product vision, and are pursuing our own. We also think subpoenaing us for this case seems unreasonable.
I suspect that with all such things, that a hacker's opinion on the relevant law is probably `/r/ConfidentlyIncorrect`.
I have no opinion on the substantial legal matters at question. It's been my observation that the ranking folks at Meta in the VR world are as ethical as fiduciary obligation permits, but YMMV.
I thank you for your reply and hope that you agree that a substantial legal matter which will inevitably be resolved by people competent to do so shouldn't become a political football in a small but influential forum of people who on average know as little about IP law as I do :)
Wether it's reasonable or not is orthogonal to the law. It's not because something is legal that it should be a thing. I think that whether or not this is legal, the idea Meta can access internal documentation from a smaller competitor is unreasonable.
Sure, but do we even know what the law currently says on this matter? I've seen a lot of speculation in the comments here, but very few facts. Even the original blog post seems to have been written before consulting an attorney.
For example, does the law have any mechanism for compensating SimulaVR for their work on this case? What mechanisms exist for appeal? Does Meta have free reign to examine the subpoenaed documents, or are there restrictions on how that information can be used and who can see it?
It just seems to me you ought to know what the law says first before arguing it needs to be changed. Chesterton's Fence and all that...
GET OFF THE INTERNET AND HIRE A LAWYER TO HANDLE THIS
You guys want to run a business, well, start acting like businessmen. Your company will occasionally get subpoenaed or - heaven forbid! - be sued. You got a third-party subpoena for documents in a litigation. Guess what, this will happen from time to time. Your attorney should be negotiating with Meta to figure out what documents/testimony your company will provide.
Honestly, your behavior makes me question your maturity. Treat this as a learning experience about the reality of the American business/legal world. Get a lawyer to handle it and shut up about the case.
Presumably they did get a lawyer, but I don't see why they should get off the Internet.
If Meta is going to use the legal system to bully tiny startups that tangentially compete with them, they might as well take a bit of a PR hit for doing it.
The parent is already going grey via downvotes, which I think is a bit harsh: "hire a lawyer and let them hire PR people" is in fact generally good advice.
This thread is 1 part "this isn't the place to litigate this" and 2 parts "i've got a beef with big tech", so it's unlikely to be germane and therefore the all caps are likely to be a bit much.
But it's good advice generally, and that shouldn't be downvoted.
Hiring a lawyer was the first thing we did. For the rest, I'd gladly do this if we had the funds to do so. We don't.
Plus, we as a company are (maybe excessively) open. Of course we're going to get involved in legal proceedings, that's a fact of life. Doesn't mean we won't talk about it.
In my highly uninformed view, you're thus far in the clear near as my uninformed, ignorant ass can tell.
But the GP's advice is still as good as when it was printed: for the most part, the under-resourced party is courting nothing but trouble by courting public opinion litigation.
Do talk to a lawyer, don't say more than you can help on the Internet. It's good advice.
> corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps
This is a fallacy: It's possible comparable open source contributions could have been made without the graces of the corporates.
For example: The giants tend to buy out their competition early, so how could it mature enough to be able to contribute comparably, or possibly better, to open source?
IMHO the open source contributions of these companies are a form of tech-washing, regardless of the honest and best intentions of their employees.
There really isn't any way to confirm or refute that kind of argument. What would happen if regulation or social norms or whatever prevented big tech companies from existing? I don't know and (frankly) you don't either.
I use emacs a dozen plus hours a day, and GNU wouldn't exist if RMS hadn't been bullied at the lunch room in the MIT AI Lab. Would the world be a better or worse place if he didn't have a personal jihad against Symbolics draped in a GNU bumper sticker?
I'm kind of confused but maybe it's my age. My career ran parallel to the birth of open source and it was explicitly a reaction against megacorps behavior and practices.
The participation in it part is newer, they were initially very hostile (I was warned any number of times aligning strategies against oss projects incase it was 'detrimental to my career')
The thing about reading GNU mailing lists is that they're so, I don't know, intimate or something. They're freely available for anyone to read, but community members talk so openly on them that you feel like you're wire-tapping someone's living room.
I've had enough professional stuff on the line to need to pay attention to GNU over the years even though it always creeped me out a little bit, and I don't see how anyone can read them without concluding that Stallman feeling personally slighted was the reason he went on the crusade, and the software freedom thing was a reasonably comfortable paintjob.
He got picked last for Symbolics, the LMI people didn't really want him around either but were getting clobbered on defense contracts so they kind of couldn't turn down his code (he's a great hacker), and the rest is sort of history until Linus comes along right?
It's dramatically easier to prove to a reasonable observer that Kubernetes got lifted off the ground by a bunch of folks on Google payroll than it is to prove that some GNU diehard would have inevitably sold that (silly) idea to like a zillion people if only Google didn't beat them to it.
I make these sort of observations with a certain regret: I was a kid already pushing the limits on a DOS-type machine when you could first get Slackware media: the GNU userspace has been home since before I ever woke up next to a girl.
But it's kinda over now. LLVM vs. GCC is a desperate rearguard action, the Rust people have broken the mindshare monopoly on shared libraries that was insulating `glibc` from it's better (`musl` in almost every case is better), old-timers like me are me are a bit attached to emacs and bash, but neovim and fish are pretty fucking good.
GNU and free software in general are no longer superior by virtue of Sun Microsystems leaning too hard into the JVM: they've got to work for it now, and they're getting their asses kicked.
That's taking it to extreme, though. It's possible that a large number of medium companies, for instance, would have the same open source yield as the megacorps who just bought them out (in our reality). Especially if it were easier for them to attract more talented engineers, which would be the case if the big companies had less of a grip on the existing market (e.g. if Meta were forced to split up, as regulators push for)
Sidebar: I don't know what "tech-washing" means. When I see that a company is laundering some bias or some social advantage through a machine learning model I just call it money laundering, because the inputs and outputs are both money and I think we've coined enough new victimhood words per year every year for many years.
If a company is profiting off it's "open-source" contributions, getting out more than it's putting in, then it's washing money through GitHub I guess. That's fair.
But "tech-washing" has this implication that any computer hacker is in a bad way, which is just silly: back when we had to go to the office the freeway overpasses we drove on had tent encampments under them.
Take that up with the Ayn Rand idiots who are not uncommon in these parts.
By "techwashing" I mean using some of the money a company makes in its main business (which in the case of Meta and some other corporates has a bad impact on society) to make
a positive technical contribution to the public
, thus helping existing and prospective employees work there with less of a guilty conscience.
Similar, to e.g. a pharmaceutical company raising the price of a medicine excessively, but then donating some of the money to build a hospital.
It's just that in the case of tech companies, the reputation washing is done via technical contributions.
> People are quite pleased to enjoy the corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps
I used to be in that boat. But after seeing where Chrome ended up, and how this affects the web today, I can't help but think that long-term, we'd be better off if the megacorps disappeared together with the funding.
I think you're giving HN too much credit. Threads involving certain topics (e.g. big tech) are completely overrun with snark and hate that I don't see much of the relentless curiosity you're talking about.
Agreed, it has become more and more frequent that HN threads are overrun by comments that seem more like they're straight out of reddit or even just your local newspaper comment section. With all the snark or aggressive dismissive pessimism they involve.
It's really sad to see because I love the HN comment section for how easily you can say a thing and everyone understands there's nuance and lots of angles to address the topic.
I've made posts about an app and the author appears curious about the issue (I'm not asking for support, just fun that folks are curious). Other people who understand the complexity (or just that there is complexity) involved are around to explore the issue / ask great questions.
Where other places the response would be the typical cynical "Oh that's just because they want you to upgrade!" and so on.
In fairness: if you talk shit on Rust here you're in for a stomping, but if you praise Rust on `/r/programming` you're in for the same stomping by a different crowd ;)
I know what you're talking about in only the way that someone who too often has been part of the problem can :)
But this forum is coming up on two decades and has like one or two full-time moderators and somehow remains an island of rational discourse in an Internet full of "I'm trained in gorilla warfare".
It has it's good days and it's bad days, (just as I do as a participant) but I think it's pretty unique.
Yeah it's definitely been making me pull my engagement back on HN. It even motivated me to get onto Twitter lol. At some point I want to read something a bit more stimulating than Tech Nextdoor. I originally came here from Digg and Slashdot because I enjoyed talking with other engineers and founders in the weeds, but I think the HN crowd has drifted far away from that start.
That said the conversation quality here on the non-hellthreads is still quite high. I enjoyed the thread on C yesterday. It's just that hellthreads and strident comments "feel" like they're becoming the norm here and it's harder to escape from them.
Yeah I have a mental denylist of HN terms at this point where I just avoid reading hn comments. In contrast to some topics where I can't wait to see discussion, those still exist, but these days (I say that like it's new, but it's been like this a while) they are fewer.
I think its good for the society as a whole to always view Mega Corps. which have more money than several governments combined with suspicion, Because even when they get punished for their 'shady dealings' the fines are usually a rounding error for their weekly revenue;
Meta's recent $400M fine for Instagram not protecting children's data comes to mind.
Public opinion on the brand seem to hold more accountability than the courts for these Mega Corps, After all Facebook did become Meta FWIW.
> try saying something bad about Kubernetes if you don't believe me
Kubernetes is an absolute mess, and I would never willingly subject myself to it.
If a humongous corporation is giving something away for free, it’s either because it suits their agenda, or because it’s so irrelevant to them they do not care.
FB definitely deserves some shade: the “move fast and break things” philosophy is real, and they’ve (we’ve) played fast-and-loose with things we didn’t fully understand, some of that ended very badly.
But as megacorps go, FB seems to have had a “come to Jesus” moment on those kinds of mistakes and done a hard pivot to a more responsible and adult posture. It was built by people barely out of childhood, certainly I was still a child when I worked there and putting a 20-something in charge of a powerful company is going to create some collateral damage. No one can say with a straight face that FB hasn’t fucked up more than once or twice.
But those kids grew up a bit, whether via altruism or pragmatism have decided to step quite a bit more carefully, and unlike 10 years ago, FB is probably closer to “don’t be evil” than Google is. It’s still a ruthless megacorp answering to shareholders, but I wouldn’t say that in 2022 it’s even close to the worst of the bunch.
Hey, I've been around here a long time and I mouth off more often than most: no moral judgements from me.
But yeah, it's a pretty gritty tone and at times it tends to blur a bit with the complaints about the interviews being too hard and the pay being too high, which isn't an awesome vibe.
I'm the last person to judge someone for shooting off, I get heated myself, but I try to be honest about what exactly the pebble in my shoe is.
Well that is unfortunate. I would not want to be in Simula's position, I'm sure they've got enough on their plate without having to deal with stuff like this that they barely have an impact on in the first place.
I understand that Meta needs to prove they're not a monopoly, and apparently the way to do that is through other companies laying their cards on the table, but my goodness would I feel uncomfortable giving core business plans, outlooks, and associated data to a huge (and arguably unethical) company like Meta.
It's unreal that this is just a thing that can be done, but I'd expect those documents to never reach the eyes of anyone who guides business decisions at Meta. Or so I hope. Or maybe this kind of information isn't as sensitive as I think, I don't run a business and have no plans to currently, so I'm not savvy in that department.
Surely if Meta need another company to help them prove something, Meta should have to compensate them. Sure, the government should be able to COMMAND a company to appear, but for one legal entity to COMMAND another legal entity to perform work and make an appearance at a place, in my mind as a Brit, seems entirely wrong.
Time to throw my Quest on eBay, not sure I want to be a part of this.
I thought it was clear in the post that Meta is being compelled by the federal government to prove they are not a monopoly and as part of this they need to present a case where they establish they have legitimate competitors. This requires information about the competitors.
This is typical for court cases. Even if a party may have little to do with what’s going on trial, if they’re a relevant party in any way they can get sucked in and be forced to give a deposition. It’s totally possible to “plead the 5th” here, but the rationale here is all the relevant facts to a case have to be brought to light in order to make an informed judgment.
There is no need for the executives at Meta to see these documents themselves to derive value from them. A lawyer seeing them and providing a verbal summary is more than good enough when deciding on strategy.
> I understand that Meta needs to prove they're not a monopoly, and apparently the way to do that is through other companies laying their cards on the table, but my goodness would I feel uncomfortable giving core business plans, outlooks, and associated data to a huge (and arguably unethical) company like Meta.
This seems too considerate to Meta. IMO, part of Meta's intention is to hurt SimulaVR. It wouldn't be by accident.
IANAL, but it came from a court because it's a court order. Failing to respond would be contempt of court - an imprison able offense.
AIUI, the reason that courts order cooperation for this sort of thing is that every party deserves the right in court to defend themselves as best as is possible. If in order to defend themselves they require information that they cannot present themselves but that someone else can (say your alibi was being at work - your boss could confirm that), then it becomes that party's civic duty to cooperate with the courts and make sure that the appropriate information can be yielded to ensure a just decision. If there are concerns about cost or potential secrecy/privacy implications, someone who is subpoenaed can bring that up with the judge who can then work with all parties to appropriately manage the situation.
The (relevant part of the) 5th amendment does not say "you never have to cooperate with the courts" it says you can not be compelled to incriminate yourself. People and companies are compelled to cooperate with courts all the time - that's literally what a subpoena is.
Btoh you and the justice system. You could plead the fifth on personal incrimination, but that may result in an investigation into your personal matters now that you've indirectly hinted that the facts you were asked to present could indicate wrongdoing.
The system could also consider your testimony to be so important as to proclaim that you shall not be prosecutable for anything that you say as part of your testimony.
Of course, all of this applies only to things within your mind. You cannot use the 5th to get out of presenting any and all existing materials that may even be perceived to be relevant to the court order. That's likely to be as initially broad as emails, business plans and documents, road maps, etc. Obviously, impeding these efforts would be contempt of court or (in the case that you destroy anything) possibly worse.
In practice though, your attorney works with the court and other parties' attorneys to identify what exactly would be relevant to the case and if any special secrecy regarding those materials and testimony is warranted. Case gets worked out, life moves on.
When all but 2 of the stairs are broken in a flight -- discussing the particularities of this break or that isn't very meaningful or productive. Perhaps the 2 functional stairs are worth another look instead.
I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size
so it's a disengineous point to bring up.
the deeper realization is that is not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards such as being ethical.
this is more important in other discussions around rights of corporations (and other comparalby powerful institutions) in contrast with the righs of human individuals (see also: censorship by 'private persons' but this person is google or something)
but let's just bury my ancestor reply before going any deeper. gosh.
It is a perfectly valid point in terms of the impact on SimulaVR which is what this discussion is about. A company is trying to get sensitive information from them. Stating the company is unethical even if all other similar companies are as well is perfectly valid.
How can it be unethical if this is how it's done across the board in the US? Meta's lawyers aren't bringing in some unheard of tactic here. This is par for the course. I'd love to hear some "ethical" means for proving without doubt that you have competitors. Admittedly I wouldn't be a good judge of their usability in court, mind.
The other piece that I think the parent was making is that how can we judge this practice as somehow speaking to the ethicalness of a broader company when the decision making process doesn't work or act like a single mind (which is how we perceive ethics to work, an internal/personal decision wherein you way the good, bad, etc)?
"To prove we have competitors, we will pull them into a legal battle they otherwise are not a part of, so we can make sure their business plans aren't something that would make them actual competitors in the future"
In the public eye, Meta is particularly unethical. It's a large part of their current downfall. So I don't agree with you that it is a disingenuous point.
facebook tried to provide equal and fair (market driven) access to political influence through their ad-platform; and they will be punished for doing so (see the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and subsequent relentless waves of bad PR against them).
political influence is not open, nor fair, nor market driven. is power driven; and the power is trying to re-assert this harsh truth.
and when I say "the power" I refer to the powerful people and their institutions who can make a political example a lá Julian Assange; the kinds of institutions and secretive traditional societies who can make somebody commit "suicide" in a federal prison; or get somebody in a presidential seat. facebook is in for a rough ride.
powers who would ally with china in secret "in order to better all of society".
powers whose only competence is keeping power, but not making power nor doing anything good with it. powerful institutions (of autonomous self-maximizing money) who know war, and war is what they will use their power for (and whence their power comes).
in another point in history I would be meeting some assassins pretty soon for daring to publish this in a semi-public forum. now all I get is dissuaded ("You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.") and buried in with the noise/spam and the garbage ([shadow]banned).
the "FB as virtues" is an insight I glimpsed through Stratechery's analysis of Facebook's woes [1].
> All news sources are competing on an equal footing; those controlled or bought by a party are not inherently privileged.
> The likelihood any particular message will “break out” is based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it. The power has shifted from the supply side to the demand side.
> on Facebook both small companies and large companies have an equal shot at customers, and both Party insiders and complete outsiders have an equal shot at voters.
so then, apparently democracy is good, justice is good, but everything is better in moderation, including these 'good' things.
the algorithmically driven market made all participants far more equal than they wanted to be; so they decided to destroy it.
> not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards such as being ethical
What? Care to explain that a bit further.
A multibillion dollar company should be held to higher standards than an individual
yet, they somehow get away with shitty actions which would be unaceptable from an individual.
they are limited liability institutions after all, the reasoning for their existence is precisely to limit the liabilities (negative consequences of their actions)... that's where the tax-payer comes in.
This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire competing organization to do market research for Meta. It is clever and evil, and nothing anybody says after this will make me think that Meta is not anti-competitive nor that they have an once of ethics. As a consumer, I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products; I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google.
This seems like a wildly emotional response that is completely out of line with what is being asked.
The FTC is suing Meta, and it has a right to get other companies to admit that they are in fact competitors to Meta in the VR Space. SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:
"Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs"
Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
> SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:...
> Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
Part of the antitrust action is determining the boundaries of the market.
If company A has a monopoly in market X, and company B competes in related market Y, ... the fact that company A intends to enter market Y does not mean company B is preventing company A from having a monopoly in market X. (But if X and Y are the same market, they are!)
At the same time, you can imagine that SimulaVR wants to assert "we are not proof META isn't a monopoly". Further, they probably don't want to provide key market information that could aid an aggressive monopolist from leveraging their way into SimulaVR's space.
Simula may not want to hurt meta (a competitor) when that competitor is burning billions in cash to prop up a VR market. They may benefit from a growing consumer awareness and UX research.
Not sure if "wildly emotional" is fair to them either.
> In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively".
But I agree, the post does seem similar to an individual trying to get attention for their cause, ie. 'Google locked me out...'. To me the tone is probably trying to help sell their narrative of them being this small thing not worth subpoenaing.
This. Further, if any other company or person can be compelled to give up their private data against their will, and perform actions and expend resources and rob from their actual jobs they need to be doing, then it for damned sure shouldn't be in service to anyone who they have no relationship with. The court should be the only ones able to do that, and the government should have to pay for it (meaning you and I of course, which means they should only do it if there is some reason that benefits us all) and any private data strictly controlled and only handled managed by the court or some agreed 3rd party.
It makes no sense at all that any company can use another to defend itself like that.
As far as I can see Meta should hire researchers to assemble data about the state of the market from public data.
Or even further, really whoever is charging Meta should have to bear that burden of collecting that data to prove it.
If corporations are people then they are innocent until proven guilty. If corporations are not people then GREAT! We have a lot of old cases I would love to see unwound that hinged on that ridiculous idea. But they can't be both at different times, and still claim to have a system that has any integrity and that we should respect.
Eyeroll. Meta did nothing wrong here. This isn't them going after their competition; they're the defendant in this lawsuit. As the article says:
> In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively". So naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
To the extent that you have a problem with the subpoena, blame the judge who authorized it, or perhaps the legal system that makes such subpoenas possible. Meta is not the aggressor here.
Facebook is very much the aggressor -- in response to the FTC suit, their immediate response was to try and use the courts to strong-arm hundreds of competitors into giving up massive troves of highly sensitive commercial secrets without any kind of formal protection, such as limiting document review to FB's outside counsel. It's ridiculous, it's abusive, it's overbroad, and it's transparently an effort to burden Facebook's competitors while snowing the FTC with massive amounts of paper.
> naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
That's not how litigation works. If SimulaVR wants protection, it has to ask for it. SimulaVR has the right to ask 1) Meta and 2) the court to limit the scope of the subpoena and to set conditions on the review and distribution of the production. If Meta agrees to the conditions, great, the agreement can either be informal, or incorporated into an order for the judge to sign. If Meta is opposed, SimulaVR gets to make their case to the judge and let him decide scope and protective order details.
Welcome to the American legal system. Facebook did nothing wrong here. When I was an attorney and involved with these kinds of subpoenas, we always worked with the third-parties to make document production less burdensome for them. SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
This isn't as strong a justification as one might imagine. That system sucks in many ways. Recently we learned that DoJ routinely take every document held by particular targeted law firms, without warrants, and then designate "taint teams" of DoJ lawyers who view every document and suggest which ones should be seen by investigators. [0] The idea is that the taint team will forget all the documents they've seen when they later investigate other clients of the targeted law firms. Many judges have ordered this practice stopped, but DoJ DGAF.
This taint team concept obviously is unconstitutional and undermines justice, but ISTM the practice you describe is worse. When Meta's lawyers view documentation extracted from SimulaVR, they do so as agents of Meta. Their current stated goal may be to defend Meta in the present suit, but there's no reason to believe that's the only goal they'll ever have. Have Meta promised to throw away all documents after some of them have been presented to the court? Is there some sort of escrow concept that allows SimulaVR to trust someone other than Meta's lawyers? The danger to SimulaVR is actually greater if Meta are telling the truth that they are competitors!
If Meta actually were competitors of SimulaVR, it would be easy to show that by hiring an expert to testify that "this service and/or product sold by SimulaVR competes with this other service and/or product sold by Meta". The sort of thing described in TFA has other purposes.
You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
Look, I get that you guys are a small shop but you should not be surprised to be asked to provide evidence in an antitrust litigation over the VR market. I'm guessing you haven't seen a subpoena before - they are all like this, and your attorneys will be able to negotiate something much less burdensome.
So get off Hacker News and let your lawyers handle it.
We made our weekly blog post about it (because it's worth talking about, IMO) and someone else posted it on HN. It blew up and we're responding to comments as necessary.
We're letting our legal counsel handle the actual details, the rest is just talking about it.
> You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
They didn't make a site to complain; it's their blog by which they're informing buyers and potential buyers of anything that can affect their progress. It also doesn't matter who shared on HN. Any HN user with an interest in them would have shared something this significant, like I was about to.
>When I was an attorney and involved with these kinds of subpoenas, we always worked with the third-parties to make document production less burdensome for them.
>SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
Question:
Is meta's lawyers bound in any way to treat simulaVR the same way you treated your subpoenaees?
I don't even care if they do, or would, the question is, are they legally bound to do so? If not, that's a systemic issue.
I suspect the answer is no they aren't, and the burden is on the subpoenaees to convince the court to limit the burdensomeness of the subpoena, which is itself a burden that is unacceptable.
Doesn't this depend on whether Meta is actually guilty of what the FTC is accusing them of? If they are, then clearly the wrong thing they did was behave anti-competitively.
If they are guilty of that, then it is fair to blame them for being dragged into their defense. While everyone has the right to defend themselves, it is fair to be upset at having to be called in the defense of someone who broke the law.
I'm not defending Meta, but what constitutes anti-competitive behaviour is often hard to define and requires a court process to ultimately decide - it's not a binary state one can easily recognize having entered or exited. If it was, many kinds of legal issue wouldn't need nearly as much court time.
Until a Court process says otherwise, Meta have done nothing wrong here.
Personally, I don't think there's any possible doubt that Meta/Facebook has behaved anti-competitively in a variety of ways over the years; the fact that they haven't been taken to task for this is largely because of the Chicago doctrine's absurd principle that such things only matter if they increase prices for consumers.
Obviously if the court rules they acted anti-competitively then yeah that would count as "doing something wrong", but I don't think it makes sense to call their legal defense itself evil. As you said, Meta has a right to defend itself in court, just like anyone.
> I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products
I made this mistake and ordered an Oculus earlier this year. While I waited for it to arrive, I setup a facebook/meta account since that is a requirement. Before the headset arrived, Meta had flagged my account as fake, and the process to prove that I was in fact a real person would not accept my cell phone number. There was nothing else I could do to prove I was real. So, fake me returned the headset when it arrived, and then fake me felt a sense of relief in the giant bullet I had just dodged.
This is a subpoena from a legal team, NOT a court. You are free to write “we don’t know” for much of the questions or even write “too burdensome to answer”. Such subpoenas have little teeth.
Hire a lawyer for a few hours to confirm what I say since I’m some random internet guy.
We've also been commanded to drop everything we're doing and go tesify on these matters _in person_, thousands of miles away from us, by the stated deadline :|
So it's not just a matter of writing "we don't know". They have to produce a lot of material and then travel 1000's of miles to show up in the court in person.
This shows that SimulaVR is run by a bunch of children. Every subpoena says this, but you work with the attorneys to figure out the time and manner that works best for the deposition. I routinely flew thousands of miles to do depositions in places that worked best for the deposed.
And complaining about how the subpoena's asking for tons of documents. Again, every subpoena does this; you have to negotiate with the attorneys on the other side to figure out what they actually want. If SimulaVR was suing Meta, then yeah, Meta will play hardball. But they're a third-party here - chances are, attorneys for Meta are looking for very specific things (namely, economics to support Meta's arguments about the VR market) and SimulaVR will be able to negotiate a way to provide that info without turning their company inside and out.
And if you are asking WHY SimulaVR should be required to provide ANY info at all... well, that's the American legal system. Courts and parties have broad power to obtain evidence from third parties.
Basically, SimulaVR needs to grow up and hire lawyers to handle this.
I'm not typically one to point at the HN guidelines, but you could have made your points and been informative without the insults. It's not helping anything and leading to otherwise unnecessary defensive back-and-forths.
So what if they don't have the funds? What if they have only so much for this but then have to close the business down because of it? It's a small startup.
Why is this so hard to grasp. This subpoena is to get certain market information. SimulaVR can negotiate with Meta to provide the information in a way that's not super burdensome for them. I did this all the time when I was a lawyer.
SimulaVR is a FRIENDLY WITNESS for Meta, since they can presumably provide evidence that Meta operates in a competitive VR market. This means Meta's lawyers will be very accommodating to get the info they need.
And yeah guess what, you need to hire lawyers from time to time when you run a business. Just like you need to hire accountants. It sucks but that's how things are.
Judging by the responses in this thread, it seems like many folks on HN have never worked with an attorney before (which isn't too surprising).
Do you have any advice on how to find a competent attorney with reasonable fees who can do the specific work that you need done? The one time I had to do this for my business on short notice, I used Yelp and Google, and it was somewhat disastrous. I think it would be really helpful for me, and a lot of other folks, to know the right way to do this.
Unfortunately I think word of mouth is the best way to find good attorneys. Ask people who run similar businesses as you who they use? If there's a chamber of commerce in your city or town, you could ask them for references.
I'll chime in to say that I was very happy with @grellas's firm in Silicon Valley. I found them the right mix of startup-friendly and competent in tech issues. (grellas.com).
Haha friendly witness. Please hand over your current and future business plans over. What could possibly go wrong. Does nobody here see how that could backfire with Meta having such insight on your business?
Lol, you mean trusting Meta's people? That's insane.
All the accounting you need to do at the beginning of your business can be done by yourself, or very cheaply. Fighting Meta's claim to your business secrets is not going to be cheap.
I was once subpoenaed by the state of New York. It was worded similarly, asking for a bunch of information and my personal appearance. I have never lived or worked in New York, and at the time was just a broke college student, so taking time off school to fly there would be more than an inconvenience. The information they sought was related to a fraud case, and their fraudster had bought something from one of my websites in the past. After I actually talked to the investigators over email, they never actually expected me to travel to New York, they were just looking for dates and IP addresses relating to these sales, which I emailed and my participation in their investigation was over. They didn't actually want me to go to New York, that was just boilerplate.
When I read the pompous first sentence of a US subpoena “COMMANDING” the recipient to do something, I like to think of it as a direct order from Vigo the Carpathian[0]
You’re missing the point. The source of the subpoena is important. Subpoenas from lawyers are not something you have to answer completely. They have no teeth. They are not from a court of law.
These specific people are being compelled to do that or the company is being compelled to show up in person? Those are wildly different demands. I find it hard to believe that specific productive employees of the company are being compelled to show up in court rather just some hired legal representatives of the company.
Right, but hiring a legal representative is going to be very expensive for a small organization.
It’s not just the few hours they’ll be testifying, or giving deposition. A reasonable corporate representative is going to need to do quite a bit of prep work and review of relevant materials. So, that’s both a legal cost, and a productivity cost for whoever is collecting those documents and briefing the corporate representative.
“Just some hired legal representatives” hides quite a bit of cost.
Honest question: Why not do what most of the ass-clowns do when they get in front of congress - "I don't know, Senator. I have no recollection, Congresswoman. I plead the 5th, You Honor. No, we don't spy on Americans." etc.? Seems like no one ever actually faces any penalties for this.
you can call an attorney and pay an hourly fee usually between 100 - 400/hr to talk with an attorney about your case or pay a retainer fee for 10 hours... attorneys that throw out 5 digit numbers when asked for a price are rip offs
Right, but the suggestion wasn't "have a short consult with a lawyer". That's not cheap, but definitely won't break the bank for most small businesses.
The suggestion was "hire a legal representative" to be the corporate witness. I would assume that's a suggestion similar to the one in this article (https://www.agilelaw.com/blog/hiring-a-lawyer-to-be-your-30b...) about hiring a lawyer to be your 30(b)(6) deponent.
So, let's assume we hire a lawyer at $300/hour. Let's say they'll be a witness for 6 hours. But, they need to be carefully briefed and prepped on all the topics that they would need to be a witness for. Maybe that's 40 hours of work.
46*$300 = $13,800.
As the article on 30(b)(6) depositions notes: "So to do it right, the lawyer will need to be thoroughly prepped on the 30(b)(6) notice topics, which will certainly take time and cost the client money. No one said litigation is cheap."
I think most small-businesses would probably choose to use an internal employee to be their corporate representatives, especially in a matter such as this where they aren't directly involved in the litigation.
Often I've gotten the initial consultation/advice for free on how to do it yourself. The point of lawyer is protecting you when you are in danger, and in my experience they're happy to tell you that you don't need a lawyer here, and give some general tips on the process.
It still find it odd that people think large corporations actively engage in ethics in any other capacity than for PR and manipulating public opinion. I have never in my life seen anything other than the smallest of private companies make a decision based on "ethical" reasons where there was a competing financial reason. Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? I have witness several companies where bringing up ethical concerns about company behavior ultimately leads to termination.
The most obvious example of this non-ethical nature of corporations is record companies bringing up the "unethical" behavior of piracy. It's not like the heads of these companies had a big ethics meeting and decided "hey piracy is not ethical, we need to fight it!" or otherwise they would have also been like "and... next on the agenda is the unethical profiting of black musicians in the 50s and 60s, we should start cutting some checks now since that was clearly wrong."
Ethics is a social construction, created by participants in a society, as a way of organizing and regulating behavior. Ethics is subtle, flexible and perpetually evolving. We as a collective can develop and evolve our ethics overtime, but the essential part is that everyone is playing the same game.
Corporations are not playing the game at all, "ethics" from the view of a corporate entity is just another tool they can use to manipulate public opinion, but they don't participate in the ethics game.
The problem is that they participating in society in an asymmetric way. They want everyone else to adhere to an ethical system when interacting with them, but consider themself completely outside the realm of ethics.
When normal humans decide that they do not want to participate in the ethics game there are consequences ranging from mild chastisement to complete estrangement from society depending on the degree one individual refuses to participate in the ethical system of the larger society.
This is not to say corporations are evil, but that are absolutely amoral in that they are not participating the moral and ethical game. Bears are amoral in the same way. We don't expect bears to make ethical decisions, but when they habitually violate the ethical code of the humans they interact with, they are usually put down as a threat to society.
> Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons?
Yes, because I made them.
As a nation built on capitalism, it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility of the decisions made by those corporations. Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant to the fact that ethics certainly ought to be considered for any individual involved who believes themselves to be "acting ethically".
I've worked hard in my career to get a seat at the table where those decisions are made because I recognize that is a place where good can be done, at scale.
We should hold ourselves, and capitalism, to higher standards. And for those of us who are leaders, whether that is a small start-up or a major conglomerate, we are responsible for creating an environment where ethical decisions can be made.
>it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility
This is an interesting idea, and I agree that it would be great if it were true, but it’s not, and I don’t think it’s ever been. Those who make decisions for corporations don’t bear any burden; everyone else does.
> Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant
This is actually a perfect example of the point I was making. "I want the benefits of participating in an ethical system but don't want the consequences".
This is why people claim that corporations behave like sociopaths.
A bear (from my example), isn't a sociopath, because it doesn't expect moral behavior from you, nor does it expect to benefit from moral behavior applied to it. A bear is perfectly amoral. A bear may cause you harm, and you may harm a bear, you might feel bad you had to kill a bear, but the bear will not be concerned either way with your ethical system, it simply wants to eat and live.
A sociopath on the other hand takes advantage of moral asymmetry, expecting you to treat it like a person when you interact with it (for example showing mercy for its trespasses), but wanting to be free to act like a bear in regards to serving its own ends.
I'm not against having Simula foot the bill in preparing whatever materials they may need to prepare to aid in the FCC's investigation - I think that's a reasonable cost of doing business, one that ought to scale with the size of the company, no? However, I agree that there may be valuable information you'd rather your competitor not have access to at your expense. Is there instances of, or analogues in other domains, of information relevant to the persecution of one party, belonging to another party, being reviewed in confidence by a third party? Or failing to find a fair solution in terms of that approach, how much can that information be trimmed?
> I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google<
I giggled. When you go from "don't be evil" to this, you know you fucked up big time. This has to be the tagline of the decade in regards to Google ("Google!, the boss of Satan", hi hi hi).
How can you determine it is cheap when Google is anticompetitively subsidizing the cost with advertising and data collection? You could be getting hosed and never know it.
Because android itself is free but I'm not seeing a lot of companies or you taking the time and effort to make an ad free Android phone for the same price or cheaper.
A competitor can’t enter the market to compete on price because Google subsidizes their product with ads. Thats the very picture of predatory, anticompetitive behavior. You can’t know what the market would be if Android were forced to compete fairly.
They’re probably largely to blame for setting the precedent that Internet services should be free. And of course backed by selling user data or unsustainable venture capital backed business models.
As modern capitalism goes, Meta is not on the low end of the scale WRT whatever we're calling ethical in a system that has legal penalties for leaving money on the table.
It's a ruthless, profit-drive, shareholder-owned, S&P 500-dominating company like all the rest, so you get all of that into the mix. It's not a particularly flattering group to be in if you're big into modern northern european social-good democracy.
But the idea that Meta is like, worse than the sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh that YC routinely connects founders with, or worse than Exxon, or worse than the pharma cartels, or? I could go on.
I don’t really know the rules of evidence, but I don’t think this is coming directly from Meta, nor that they’re allowed to review these documents themselves. The subpoena has to come from the court, and so I imagine it’s the court reviewing the documents, not Meta. I sure hope that’s how it works. I’d love for a lawyer to chime in, though.
? It is literally coming from Meta. That's what the subpoena and court filings that are screenshotted on that page show. Meta sought the subpoena, the court granted it, and now Simula has to testify at a deposition where the questions will be asked by Meta.
And... it sort of has to work this way? It's not the job of the court to do Meta or FTC's advocacy for them.
Rather a lawyer that is admitted to the case uses his power as a representative to serve a subpoena. These are usually NOT reviewed by the judge or court first. The person receiving a subpoena can ask the court to quash the subpoena (basically void or modify the subpoena) if they believe the subpoena is inappropriate, unduly burdensome, or whatever else.
IANAL, but I would imagine that at the very least, Meta's lawyers would need to be able to see the documentation so that they can adequately prepare their argument/defense.
If this is actually how US's justice system works it is even more bonkers than I thought. Could someone versed in this legal system explain, please? Is is any accused that can demand documents/data/free research from vaguely related third parties, or only large companies? Enquiring minds want to know!
If one is accused of antitrust practices (as Meta is by the FTC), your defense is to show that there's actually competition. It's not that Meta that wants the documents for corporate espionage (or whatever), but that they want to prove that SimulaVR is competing just fine in the market that contains Meta. This is explained in the article, which many here clearly didn't read past the headline. This is roughly the same as subpoenaing someone as a witness; you don't really have a choice.
In fact, Meta themselves won't be looking at the documents; their lawyers, the FCC, and the rest of the court will. This is standard procedure, and no different from if SMALL_CORP sued BIG_CORP; BIG_CORP would still have to comply with subpoenas from SMALL_CORP.
Yeah, and we’re reacting to how crazy it is that Meta’s competitors are required to divulge internal documents to Meta so Meta can make a case that they aren’t anticompetitive.
> It's not that Meta that wants the documents for corporate espionage
Yes I’m sure we all trust Meta will behave ethically when given private information.
They're not required to divulge documents. They're required to respond to the subpoena. An acceptable response is that you don't want to divulge because they're confidential or the request is too burdensome.
I believe the stance of the justice system is that Facebook's lawyers will behave ethically with the information because it's a professional obligation for lawyers.
You and I might see that as a laughable claim - unfortunately the justice system is run entirely by lawyers.
So someone is sued for anticompetitive practices and that gives them alibi for looking directly into others' books, and they're just supposed to trust Meta will forget all the information afterwards?
IANAL, but AIUI in theory all major competitors get subpoenaed and then everything they say becomes part of the public record - so everyone sees everyone's cards laid out.
How exactly does that change anything? Meta is a 100000x larger company, they can do much more with that info than the others. And what about foreign competitors? What about not yet founded/stealth competitors? What about competitors only maybe planning to release a product (e.g. Apple)?
Yes, that's what a subpoena is. And it can be done in pretty much any legal system.
If you're on trial for murder, and your alibi is 'I was at work', you're going to need your boss to come in to testify on your behalf. If he doesn't feel like it, the court will compel him to show up and testify, on his time, and on his expense, under penalty of prejury.
If I was at work when the murder occurred, two or three discussions between police and my boss and coworkers would prevent a murder trial in the first place. Prosecutors don't like defendants with solid alibis.
Probably FTC has already done equivalent investigation, which calls the subpoena described in TFA further into question.
My understanding is that these kinds of enforcement actions have a much lower success rate than criminal cases, because large firms with legal departments are rarely squarely in the wrong. They are usually treading a grey line, and evidence like this can push the case one way or another.
But by doing this, they are inadvertently showing that a company like SimulaVR cannot compete in this space, as the small team in charge of actually doing some work now has to devote its time to take care of this.
What happens if SimulaVR tells these lawyers to pound sand? I cannot imagine if I ran a small buisness and I was the victim of this how I would afford it.
I suppose this is why it’s a bad idea to run any company from the USA. Being victimized by their corrupt legal system at your own expense… This sort of thing doesn’t happen when you run your company from behind Tor and use crypto for payment.
Most legal systems do this: if you're accused of doing X, and your claim that you weren't doing X hinges on evidence that can only be produced by other parties, you explain that to the court, and then the court can decide to compel those other parties to produce that evidence in the interest of a fair trial.
In this case, Meta is being accused of anti-competitive behaviour. Their claim is that there is plenty of competition and that if they are to be put on trial, then they should be able to present evidence that there is competition. The court agreed with that statement. Meta themselves cannot produce that evidence, because they are not privy to business goings-on at other companies, all they can see is other companies that are--in their opinion--competing in the same space. As such, Meta can only go "we consider the following companies our competition, their documents should make it ample clear that we are in competition" with enough of an additional explanation to justify each company listed. And then the court goes "very well, this is motivated enough to justify us compelling these companies to produce the evidence that you claim exists as part of discovery".
The only quirk here is the claim that a small company can't reasonably do what is being requested of them by the courts. And again: not by Meta, but by the courts. Meta doesn't get these documents, only Meta's legal team gets those documents, Meta employees don't get to see what's in the many boxes of discovery material that their legal team is going to receive. Not Bob from accounting, not Kelly from finance, and not Mark from the CEO team. Only the lawyers do.
Its still unethical. First off its not that big enough of a deal to warrant the financial obliteration of a small buisness via legal fees/airfare/hotels etc. Nobody died or has their life at stake here. Second off the company should be compensated for their expenses(lost buisness/airfare/legal fees). If this doesnt happen, then its clearly a court unjustly financially harming a small buisness. Thankfully we live in an era where its now possible to operate a company anonymously and not be beholden to unethical national legal systems operating at the behest of the ultra-wealthy.
You try to downplay the severity by saying "only Meta lawyers can see the contents" but that is still wrong. Whos to say these lawyers wont steal your trade secrets and use them to their own advantage? These people are still on Meta's payroll and nothing prevents Meta from asking its lawyers to divulge those secrets. To trust them not to is incredibly naive.
> You try to downplay the severity by saying "only Meta lawyers can see the contents" but that is still wrong. Whos to say these lawyers wont steal your trade secrets and use them to their own advantage?
They are ethically and legally bound not to. They can be disbarred, sanctioned, sued by SimulaVR, even thrown in prison. You're here ranting about the US court system, but you're wrong about a lot of it.
Lawyers, especially highly paid giant-tech-firm representing lawyers, tend to play by the rules when it comes to the actual court process itself. Could they pass all this confidential information on to Mark? Absolutely, trivially so even. Would it be a crime to do so? Absolutely also that. Are they going to risk their firm for a client? No lawyer playing at the level of Meta or Apple would be that stupid.
When it comes to lawyers, you get what you pay for, and Meta pays a lot for excellent lawyers who make sure they do everything by the book and follow the letter of the law where possible, and the spirit of the law where it can be defended if it needs to be, in order to get cases thrown out or settled before they make it to actual trial.
Most cases die in discovery, exactly because the lawyers (and only the lawyers) get to see everyone's cards, and get to say "look we can go to trial, but we've both seen all the documents, and it's plainly clear that one of us is right".
"But they can air all that dirty laundry during trial!" no, they can't, because unless that dirty laundry is necessary to demonstrate competition, which would be stupidly unlikely, you don't just get to reveal every document that your legal team has access to just because you feel like it. Doing so can get you removed from trial, sanctioned, or even disbarred, depending on how severe the impact of your misconduct is. The current issue is about discovery: you and your team (and NOT your client) get to find the information you need by sifting through thousands of documents.
Just because they “could be disbarred” or go to prison does for it also doesn’t mean they physically can’t or won’t do it. So I’m actually not wrong about anything I said here.
Yes, but in practice, this is just an opening offer in a negotiation. Parties will typically counter with something like: depose me in my home town for no more than x hours, and I'll produce what docs I have if you sign a protective order that makes produced info attorney's-eyes-only, i.e., business people cannot review. Unlikely a court would require more than this.
That negotiation still requires lawyers. Overall less legal expense assuming it succeeds, but we're still talking about a 5-figure legal bill at minimum, which for a small startup is a big hit. The employee distraction will probably double the cost at least, so it's reasonable to expect they'll lose 6 figures on this, which is equivalent to hiring another employee.
In-between Meta’s “to show that we have competition, we would like to show company Foo’s documents on X, Y and Z” and this subpoena is a judge who decides on whether those documents would help them reach a decision in this case, and whether it’s reasonable to ask Foo to do that work.
Also, the data you provide goes to the court, not (directly) to Meta.
I also think you can ask the court to keep (parts of) the data from the public record. That would require an argument as to why making it public would harm you.
It's not nearly as crazy as it sounds. If you were accused of murder and your alibi was you were at a bar, then the court could force the bar to produce any video footage they had, any records of transactions etc. If it was claimed that I was at said bar on said night, I could be forced to appear in court and produce any diary entries I had, any photos on my phone from that night. These are reasonable requests.
Meta is allowed to defend themselves against lawsuits. SimulaVR is a startup in the space. They have a shot in VR, or at least believe they do. SimulaVR a great example for Meta to use to defend themselves against a stupid lawsuit.
The FTC shouldn't be bringing this case. VR is still up for grabs. Defining the relevant market as the "dedicated fitness virtual reality app market" is questionable, and the idea it "proves the value of virtual reality" is nonsense.
The idea that meta have some dominant position that can't be overcome is like suggesting Excite or Altavista had a dominant position in search that couldn't be overcome in the 90's, or MySpace in social in the early 00's. It's too early to call this market "won".
Curious statement, considering the FTC is trying to preserve competition in the space. Excite and Altavista weren't trying to buy up the biggest websites around at the time.
Yes and they are overreaching in response to a perceived miss many years ago when FB bought Instagram. The VR market is so young and small that it doesn't need regulatory intervention. Let's allow it play out a little bit before we get regulators involved who think things like: this app is something which "proves the value of virtual reality to users".
And yeah, they were, and they were being bought and sold, and Yahoo too. There was lots of m&a action in the space. Virtually everyone involved went under despite having a dominant position for a hot minute.
> "Meta already owns a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, and it had the capabilities to compete even more closely with Within’s popular Supernatural app. But Meta chose to buy market position instead of earning it on the merits."
I don't buy that VR is so young, we're a couple generations in now on multiple platforms. There are still new entrants in the space, which is good, and they would be negatively impacted if there were less established independent developers. Facebook had a head start, and they're trying their best to lock up the market before Apple/others enter it.
They do try to build better hardware and software. At this point they are throwing everything they have at it. The FTC are treating them as though it's a big, profitable, won market where Meta isn't playing fair. In reality it's a small, money losing, no winner market where Meta is trying to create something.
This is growth at all costs. Big companies buying up established independent developers to add to their services while consumers have less choice. AB/MS, Figma/Adobe, it needs to stop.
The VR market isn't in that phase. Adobe is in a big market with a strong position, makes a lot of money. That market has been around for decades. VR is default dead right now.
Though I'm not a lawyer, I believe defendants in court cases are entitled to command witnesses (signed off by a judge) to provide evidence that could be used in their defense.
It makes sense in the abstract: e.g. imagine you're accused of murder, and you know someone saw you somewhere else at the supposed time of the crime, yet they refuse to provide evidence to help you. It would seem reasonable they could compel you under that circumstance to testify.
Since the FTC has initiated a court case against Meta, I assume they are provided a similar legal right to command competitors to provide evidence that they haven't behaved "anti-competitively".
The question becomes whether, in this particular instance, they're abusing that privilege by demanding information they shouldn't be entitled to from unrelated/extraneous parties.
Heh, demand that the court provide you immunity from prosecution for being a monopoly, or refuse to testify on the fifth (because you obviously are a monopoly planning on buying Meta).
It's explained in the post. The FTC accused them of being anti-competitive. The only way to show you're not anti-competitive is to demand documents of your opponents that demonstrate you still have competition.
Seems like a "I'll know when I see it" situation. In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are and at least should be blocked from acquiring their competition.
Breaking them up or taking actual action against them would require deeper investigation with FTC taking the lead rather than potentially handing sensitive documents over to the offending company.
If the company wants to fight the block of acquisitions would foot the bill for everyone being supeonaed along with the FTC's expenses regardless of the case's success.
> In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are
Wait? What?
It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right. I mean, if I said, all people the police arrest are probably guilty and should go to jail, I would hope you'd disagree.
> It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right.
Big cases against big companies are different. Since the company will have (nearly) unlimited resources to fight, the FTC will only bring a case if they're pretty sure they can win, otherwise it will be a big waste of money all around.
It's really not anything like the police arresting people.
IANAL, so take this with some salt, but I don’t think Meta is directly requesting the documents, and Meta is probably never going to see them. I don’t think they get to request everything and pick through it to find a defense.
Subpoenas come from the court (which is how they’re able to be legally binding, i.e. you can be held liable—-in contempt—-for not complying), so my guess is that the court will review the various documents for evidence that Simula is or isn’t a competitor, so as to decide both whether they fit the bill as a competitor, and whether they’ll be needed during a trial. I imagine that the court can even decide that Simula does not provide evidence in either direction, so they’ll uninvolve Simula.
Documents have to be given to both sides or it's a pretty easy mistrial. It is likely nobody but Meta's lawyers will ever look at any of it, but they will look to try to build a defense.
And if something interesting WAS found, it would get out. And some of these things would become public record, either way.
I don't begrudge them their annoyance (or click-through harvesting) but there is a straightforward legal process for objecting to and quashing a subpoena. Seems like it might apply here, at least in part: https://www.klgates.com/Litigation-Minute-Responding-to-Thir...
Also RE some speculation in this thread, it seems very unlikely to me that Meta's legal team was looking to get some free market research, but it is interesting to consider.
If you never been through discovery, it can seem that way, but nothing is straightforward or cheap about responding to a subpoena in a high profile case with a $500B company.
Samsung, Nintendo, and the other parties listed likely will spent $1-2m on these subpoenas. It likely involves thousands and thousands of messages and documents. A lot of back and forth with lawyers ("Each of these 12 employees exported everything with the word 'roadmap' in their email? what about Sandy's personal phone; I see a reference to an SMS elsewhere"), IP council to redact things, and then prep and support for the deposition.
SimulaVR is a tiny startup. It very well could kill them.
yeesh – one would hope that would fall under "undue burden or expense" but yeah I guess you never know how this kinda thing plays out until you've been through the ringer (like everything). Thinking again, I can't believe I included the descriptor "straightforward"
These types of things are incredibly silly. During the Epic vs Apple charade, Apple subpoenaed Steam for financial records as well which the judge forced Steam to comply with. The fact that a situation completely unrelated to me can force me to hand over what I would consider business secrets is a bit absurd.
Exposing those "business secrets" still has value, even to the general public. However, Apple should also have been forced to reveal their financial records.
This blog post doesn't explain what they are actually going to do about this. It's just a (non-legal) complaint about the fact they got a subpoena, which is honestly a pretty normal and uncontroversial thing. It might be bad for Meta to request this info, but if so, the right thing to do is get a lawyer, submit a motion to quash, and then go after Meta for costs through legal process.
What is SimulaVR actually going to do to respond to this? Do they intend to respond? Who's representing them? I can't imagine a lawyer recommended writing this blog post.
The "we can't afford this" argument doesn't hold water. Lawyers are expensive but this is not a complicated thing SimulaVR is being asked to do, and they're likely to get their costs back from the court if they ask.
Well I am not a lawyer, and if I was a lawyer I wouldn't be a lawyer in that country, but my understanding is that SimularVR is under no obligation to create any new documents or gather any new information. So for example the answer to "Fine-grained usage statistics of our software" can legitimately be "we don't have any". If I was SimulaVR I would gather all documents that currently exist, and be very careful about creating any new documents regarding any of this before consulting with a lawyer. I imagine that creating new documents in answer to this might create further obligations, but I really don't know.
Of course I'm not a lawyer and don't really know what I'm talking about, and this is not legal advice.
Sounds like ~~Meta~~ Facebook is planning on moving into SimulaVR's turf and wants to know all the details for free and is abusing a legal process to get it.
Doesn't seem like a coincidence they are the only tiny headset subpeonaed while others are big (public) corporations.
I'm not a lawyer but: you can get all this stuff done in an hour. It's not an exercise in creating new material. You pull all the documents you already have on stuff like this, and anything you don't have you can say you don't have.
When you appear and are asked, give a short, high level but honest description of the industry - it's pretty simple really - "it's early stages, there are a number of players, Meta is the big dog as it currently stands."
"I am not a developer, but adding multi tenancy to our product is as simple as adding a tenantid to every field in our database! Should only take a day or two"
Yeah, even if you're willing to defend your competitor you will still need to screen your documents to see which needs to be sealed and which documents that are under an NDA with an unrelated party that can be excluded. An hour is definitely too short for this, even if you have 100 lawyers (because the bottleneck is you and your knowledgeable employees and your lawyers won't likely to know the breadth of third-party secrets).
On the other hand, you won't be compensated (fully) after this. You may be able to recover your attorneys' fees in some cases but your transportation costs won't (it'll be only a token fee set by court).
They won't have hundreds of parties which they have documents under NDA and many NDAs have carve-outs for court orders anyway. All their docs are likely in Google Drive, Box or MSFT's thing, they can literally do it in an hour. If they try to do it in an hour it might take them 2.
There isn't a state licensing requirement to be a software developer. Any person off the street can start writing software tomorrow and call themselves a developer. There are a good number of jobs where someone needs to know a lot about the law, has taken courses or read a lot about it, makes decisions on legal matters on a day to day basis, but cannot call themselves a lawyer. A couple examples include anyone who works on mergers and acquisitions or distressed debt investing.
It's similar to "im not a financial advisor" or "this isn't financial advice". It can be from someone who knows an awful lot about the topic.
I think making assumptions about operating models, how easy something is or isn't to gather, etc. is inappropriate. In the same way a random 3rd party may make assumptions about you or your life based on these posts. They don't know you or anything about you.
Unless you have some unique insight into the situation, your assessment of the simplicity of dealing with this subpoena is not useful.
Obviously, SimulaVR feels differently or they wouldn't have written a blog post about it, wouldn't be in these comments, and we wouldn't be talking about it. And they'd know how onerous it is, given it affects them and they've said it is.
It's a forum, it's basically for speculation. Short of being rude, virtually nothing is "inappropriate". Saying something is "inappropriate" just suggests one doesn't have a reasonable response to the points made.
I've gone through it, from both sides. For a small company or individual, it's just not something to panic about or assume will consume an enormous amount of time. That isn't "unique" insight, lots of people go through this, the US is a litigious place. To be clear, they are not on trial.
Off topic but their product seems awesome - VR computers specifically designed for coding, including displaying small text, running Linux, etc. Beats working from a coding laptop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x293SiEdv4M&t=25s
It really is - and on the topic of "competition"..
Meta is not a competitor to Simula and honestly never will be because they will never give you Freedom to run Linux and hack to your heart's content.
But Simula is a competitor to Meta in that their existence gives people like me a serious (non-toy) VR headset they'd actually buy. So the reason Meta has competition from Simula is because they're terrible from a consumer-privacy and -respect perspective.
That's only technically correct. I'd say given the words I said around "Linux," your response is pedantic at best.
Android is in no way what I want. And is it Open and Free? Can I do whatever I want with it? Can I install NixOS Mobile? Jailbreaking doesn't count since we are talking about official product offerings.
If I can't run my own software from source + make my device completely decoupled from Meta, it isn't a competitor of Simula to me.
Reminds me of Immersed[1]. Which is an amazing concept but horrible on the Oculus. Literally makes me sick - and screen resolution/clarity leaves a lot to be desired if you're already at 4k/144hz.
I can't wait until someone cracks the code on this and makes it a reality.
Yeah, Immersed popped up alongside us. A big reason of why we went the hardware route (as an originally pure software product) was that the existing hardware was not good enough.
Having worked with the prototype headset, I can fairly confidently say that at least the picture quality is now good enough (with our optical train/displays)
I’m surprised to see that Apple isn’t on the list of companies being subpoenaed. Maybe one advantage of not announcing your hotly rumored VR project until it’s done and available is that no one can subpoena you to ask about it.
This seems a bit wild and super anti-competitive, of course it's hard to say with only hearing from simulaVR's perspective.
The content of information they're required to handover also seems incredibly sensitive, wouldn't that basically give Meta more 'Market Research' simply by reviewing these documents ?
It does seem a little bit like the corporate version of a 'Slap suite' also given how financially restricted Simula seem.
Meta’s defense on not being anti-competitive is to use the legal system to force all potential competitors to turn over incredibly sensitive information about their business & operations…
how is this even allowed under the law? Can Facebook really just demand this?
That's not really what's happening here. Meta can't just steal that info; it goes to Meta's lawyers, who will review it and decide what to do based on it. Meta itself won't get to see it, necessarily, unless the court lets them.
You might say "well, you can't trust lawyers" - but most attorneys actually take the security of processes like these extremely seriously, because they'll lose their jobs (and law licenses) if they don't.
But anyway, the right thing to do if SimulaVR doesn't want to reveal this info is to oppose the subpoena and try to get it quashed. Not write angry blog posts.
Are there rules preventing Meta from seeing the info? It seems like they would be allowed, themselves, to look at anything considered evidence in the case, barring an order from the judge to the contrary.
I believe what SimulaVR would do is petition the court to seal their responses and put conditions on who and how those responses can be viewed. Not an uncommon thing to do.
I do wonder if this blog post might be used by Meta in a way the authors didn't intend. Stating that they are not at all worried about competition from Meta is exactly what Meta needs to present as evidence.
Aside from that I'm not convinced SimulaVR shouldn't be worried. Regardless of whether Meta is targeting the productivity space intentionally (it is, I think) SimulaVR can very easily be a casualty of their dominance. For example I was interested in buying into SimulaVR but I probably won't if the Quest Pro is even close to good enough because along with that I get access to all the Oculus games etc.
I hope SimulaVR does crowdfounding the legal costs instead of folding to facebook.
This is the first and yet only VR Product i am deeply interested in.
From their post, it appears that Simula don't intend to comply with the subpoena. IANAL. Does receipt of these documents carry an obligation to provide the documents and deposition requested? Does this open them to later legal action if they refuse? It seems like a strange thing for a corporation to be able to demand that other companies hand over stuff like this, no matter the circumstance.
Apologies, I apparently read too much into your statement about difficulty of hiring a legal defense and your "hope [that] they leave us alone." Good luck and I hope this doesn't take the wind out of your sails too much.
I know it's not helpful at this point, but you really should have had a relationship with a lawyer already. But now is the next best time. This is just the first time you're running into issues. As you grow, you're almost guaranteed to hit more. You'd also be smart to have a lawyer available to review all of your intellectual property, terms of service, privacy policies, etc.
I'm just a solo punter myself, but having my legal counsel already setup, knowing that I can call them at any time, rather than having to scramble to find someone in the moment a problem happens, gives me a lot of peace of mind.
Given how you're positioned as an Open Source company, maybe the Electronic Frontier Foundation can help you find someone good.
We already have standing legal counsel. George made it sound like we're just now seeking a lawyer, but we already reviewed our policies etc in the past.
If that's true, it sounds like companies have been weaponizing the legal system to get access to proprietary information from their competitors. Surely that has got to be illegal somehow?
The court decides whether a subpoena should be upheld or not. If the judge has signed off on this one, then it's all legit. Failing to comply would be contempt of court.
I'll never understand how US court system basically allow you to randomly force anyone unrelated to a case into it and suffer the legal cost. It make it so easy to weaponize any case to your advantage.
What if a ruling requires information held by someone else? Should the case just be dismissed because of lack of evidence? Having a functional justice system is probably worth some snags.
The legal cost aspect is unfortunate. However, as others have mentioned, the court probably doesn't require the assembly of new documents, but rather submission of existing ones. So while there is a cost, it's not devastating.
The interesting question is whether or not this specific subpoena has real merit, or if the court was played by Meta.
A subpoena is a court order (and the service requirement constitutes legal proof that it was delivered). Refusal to comply is contempt, which can be punished as a crime. No, you don't get to ignore a subpoena.
In this particular case it looks like they're just being asked to testify about their product in an unrelated case. They aren't being sued.
Call your lawyer first and do what they say. Most likely you can arrange a deposition more convenient to your schedule and location.
Just want to clarify: we're not ignoring this subpoena and intend to comply with the law. We're in contact with a lawyer and are discussing our options with them.
From what I understand vexatious litigant is a really, really high bar to cross, and any remotely competent lawyer should be able to prevent you from crossing it.
People are really (really) misinterpreting this. The OP isn't being sued, they aren't being attacked as a competitor to Meta. (In fact the obvious guess here was that they're being asked to testify in this antitrust case to the fact that their product is successful!)
A subpoena is just a demand for testimony. The court wants to "know what you know" so it can make a better decision. Testimony before courts of law is part of your civic duty as an inhabitant of a nation under the rule of law. Yes, it has costs. You have to bear them for the same reason you need to pay your taxes, because a civilization without courts isn't one we want to live in.
> People are really (really) misinterpreting this. The OP isn't being sued, they aren't being attacked as a competitor to Meta.
The only way to misunderstand this is to not have read the linked page. HN is not immune from headline-only outrage. The first paragraph literally ends with:
> ... in relation to the government's recent injunction against their acquisition of a VR fitness company.
Costs don't have anything to do with being sued or not. A subpoena to a person is relatively easy to respond to (unless you need a lawyer to help you negotiate the fifth amendment for reasons), but this will cost time and money, both things that we all know startups have in vast quantities.
If the answer is not Meta pays, then why isn't it?
I told you: The recipient pays as part of their civic duty. If you want protection under the law for your own grievances, you need to be prepared to assist the court in the adjudication of the grievances of others.
And the practical reason is that poor people have the right to petition courts for redress of grievances too. You're upset because Zuckerberg happens to be rich, so this seems unfair. But what if the startup had to sue someone and needed testimony from someone else to prove their case? You think they should have to pay just to get facts before the court?
Once more: it's just a subpoena. OP is looking at a few thousand dollars of legal fees and maybe a trip to wherever the court is. If you're operating a profit-seeking company in a legal regime that provides the protection that ours does, you simply have to be able to bear those costs. If your VC's or angels won't pay it, they aren't serious investors.
The subpoena is issued by a judge for a pending case, you can either fight it by submitting an opposing motion or be held in contempt of court which in this case is pretty much a loss.
I get the arguments that Meta is forced to defend it's claim it's not being anticompetitive, but isn't part of a small business like SimulaVR's sole competitive advantage being secretive with it's plans because it doesn't have to publicly state everything it's doing?
Wouldn't this take that away from them? Is it not a simple enough point to object to the subpoena on?
As someone who is not a lawyer, my question is what are the potential response avenues to a subpoena like this. That is, Meta has essentially demanded a ton of work from SimulaVR, for free. I very much agree with Simula's response of "We can't afford stuff like this".
So, realistically, what are Simula's options? I imagine a "fuck off" response won't go over well with the court. Can they give some cursory information? Is there some way they can challenge the subpoena as overly burdensome?
I hate how our legal system makes it so easy to demand work from someone else, when the burden on the demanding party is so extremely low. Why shouldn't Meta need to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for the information they are requesting? The lawyers are definitely charging that much.
This kind of subpoena is boilerplate. No one actually expects SimulaVR to provide all this information or to show up for a deposition.
This is actually how it will go down:
SimulaVR-Lawyer: Hey Meta-lawyer, I got your subpoena. We're a tiny company and this is overbroad. What do you guys actually want?
Meta-lawyer: Totally understand. Can we get a declaration from your founder about what your company is trying to do, who their competitors are, and few info about your financials? If you have pitch decks for investors, we'd love to get that as well.
SimulaVR-Lawyer: That seems doable but can the financials be filed under seal and attorney-eyes-only?
Meta-lawyer: Yeah that makes sense.
SimulaVR-Lawyer: Lemme talk to the founders and follow up with you. Let's talk later about what the declaration will look like.
Meta-lawyer: Thank you - appreciate it, and looking forward to hearing back soon.
Not a lawyer or involved in the legal system, but is this a situation where you can respond with your rates for providing this expert witness service? If so, this may be a situation where you can charge them $500/hr plus costs (eg atty) for the service of extracting, redacting and summarizing some of the information they've requested.
Edit: your attorney may have a better idea of what rates for this might be, but I'd suggest looking into what it costs to have a known and respected third party physician do chart review and testify in court in malpractice cases, then consider what they'd charge if they were also expected to anonymize and show information from their own practice and patient charts.
We ran it past them and they ok'd it. We as a company are fundamentally very open. It is quite literally a core facet of our business, and that includes not just the technical parts.
Of course there's stuff that's internal, but something that's literally a matter of public record isn't it.
One annoying thing about Facebook is that they already have zero goodwill among anybody who pays attention to this kind of stuff, so it isn't like these kind of shenanigans will really hurt their reputation.
Frankly there is nothing worse than seeing a legal notice. At best it means thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and added stress/lost time. At worst its the end of a company.
I know this story won’t make headline news but boy, Meta sure seem to be going out of their way to shred every last bit of goodwill they have with, well, everyone?
If I were simulaVR, I would make this very painful to meta.
You would put together business plans that literally say no other vendor can compete against meta. Basically confirm the anti-competition. That even that subpeona is anticompetive and an attempt to further crush them.
I think the subpoena is mostly for existing records and novel records of existing plans. IANAL, but I think if you were to create novel documents that were most certainly less than honest for the purpose of swaying the case, there could be legal consequences for you.
Courts aren't stupid - if it becomes apparent that you are attempting to maliciously comply, they can still get you based on your apparent intent.
Simula has to have a business plan. Has to list their competitors like HTC and Meta who are anticompetitively working together on a virtual world. viveverse is literally called metaverse; technically i don't know if it's literally the same virtual world.
You can then look at Lenovo, Microsoft, Valve and Google whose VR stuff died. Your assumption is they cant compete against them.
Then you explain your business plan of finding a wierd open source niche. Entirely because competing against meta is impossible.
I'm not saying fabricating evidence or like try to get your accounts banned off facebook to make it look like they are trying to crush you. You simply make the reasonable argument and business case a unresourced startup can't compete against a 350billion $ org with an army of devs.
Meta's fault for bothering you. Then again you're literally holding a paper vial of anthrax on this one if you do it. #YOLO
Yeah, don't go creating bullshit in response, but anyone who is remotely connected to anything Meta, Google, Apple are involved in should have in their documents details on why they won't be competing with the big names.
Best case is Simula can file an injunction along the lines of not being a competitor or not having any relevance and wishing to keep their trade secrets...secret.
Otherwise, comply with only existing documentation. For example, if they requested fine-grained details on metrics that don't exist, then the correct response to that is "doesn't exist".
Isn't that what they already did with this statement? Quoting last paragraph subtitle "We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta" is exactly that. Therefore the FTC can take that and prove FB is a monopoly, or whatever FTC end-game is.
That sounds like a bold faced lie to me. To quote the article:
>Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and laptops. So our real competition is laptops & PCs, not other gaming headsets.
Everything Meta has been releasing publicly about their VR Headset plans make it blatantly clear that it is not only targeting gaming.
How about a look at Meta's app sales to prove that? I think this list of who the subpoena was served to is pretty hilarious, and it's even more hilarious that Apple's not on this list:
Alphabet Inc.
ByteDance Inc.
HTC America, Inc.
Huawei Technologies USA, Inc.
Nintendo of America Inc.
Panasonic Corporation of North America
Samsung Electronics America, Inc.
Simula VR, LLC
I think the malicious intent is all on Meta's side. They have a head start with Occulus, no one else is even close in the US.
It's hilarious because of Simula's size compared to the rest, and because it doesn't include Apple/Valve, and really, only those two should even be on the list at all! They literally subpoenaed everyone except their real potential competition. I get it, they subpoenaed whoever they could. I think the FTC in the Bloomberg story linked in the post said it best: "It reflects their scorched-earth defense strategy here to fight in whatever manner is available to them"
There isn't anyone with a current model headset like the Quest, that is even remotely close in market share in the US.
Never forget, the company is called Facebook. The Meta rebrand was a desperate ploy to sidestep negative attention surrounding ongoing litigation and to bolster hope in the dying company as they try to pivot toward VR.
The problem here is the FTC trying to regulate a nascent industry by fiat. The startup is caught up in the silliness of trying to define competition in an area of trade that doesn’t really exist yet. Exactly when the FTC should go find something better to do, like health claims in supplements.
Couldn't SimulaVR request all the same documents from Meta in response? Or is it a one-way process?
I'm sure Meta's legal team would find reasons why they wouldn't have to be responsive or other ways narrow the scope. SimulaVR in turn could use the same arguments against Meta.
Ordered a founders edition many months ago. I hope to use it one day and add it to my nixos config.
If not it'll help the open source community. One thing is certain, the VR/AR I want to use won't come from big tech.
ianal but if I were drafting simula's motion to quash, I would mention that the categories of information fb wants are confidential or trade secrets under most employment agreements, including probably fb's
and that rule 45 requires the court to quash if the subpoena is for 'privileged or other protected matter'
and if you can prove undue burden you can sanction their firm (in theory at least)
(could also just refresh the northern district's efile until big G responds, then steal theirs)
Being forced to divulge your trade secrets to a competitor company’s legal team + cover the cost of travel to court in a far away state + denial of income- under circumstances in which you’ve done nothing wrong -might be “normal legal process” but it’s highly unethical in my opinion. Just one of many ways in which a small business in USA can get wreaked by the legal system over the most frivolous of things.
From what I'm gathering it's on SimulaVR to respond to the subpoena, but there's nothing preventing them from having their solicitor contact Meta's and arrange for payment to cover costs.
>We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta
>...Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and laptops.
Hate to break it to you, but if you don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is actively trying to create VR devices that are general-purpose productivity devices aimed at replacing PCs and laptops, you haven't been watching some of their recent videos about the new headsets and prototype headsets they're working on. He very much is aiming for that market with future devices (not the Quest 2).
Here's a couple:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMpWH6vDZ8E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zHDkdkqd1I
Also he's described their Project Cambria headset as intended for productivity, as in the following article:
"What’s different about Project Cambria?
The most important description we’ve received about Project Cambria comes from The Information; according to the publication, Meta employees have alternately described the headset as a “laptop for the face” or a “Chromebook for the face.” It’s a device Zuckerberg hopes people will use to get work done rather than being aimed primarily at gamers as with previous headsets."
https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-project-cambria-what-we-kno...
We understand Meta sometimes future projects that their devices will have broad office applications, but we're skeptical it has any teeth.
Consider that Atari tried to compete with office PCs in the early 80s with their 8-bit family, and failed: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_...
It's hard to focus on multiple things at once, and we're skeptical that the bureaucratic forces in play at a large company like Meta will allow them to do a good job at making their gaming platform also one that people actually want to work in.
"We don't think they're competent enough to be a competitor" is a bad way to judge whether you're competing with someone. It's like Apple laughing at the IBM PC.
Just want to clarify that I would never characterize Zuckerberg or Meta as "incompetent". Quite the contrary. I would instead more characterize the situation as Paul Graham did in one of his essays[1]:
> A lot of startups worry "what if Google builds something like us?" Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about-- not even Google. The people at Google are smart, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
To be honest, Meta seems pretty afraid of going out of business if their metaverse-pitch ends up failing - in fact, I'm pretty sure the whole metaverse push just happened because FB was (is) loosing ground fast.
I think Zuckerberg is afraid of his core beliefs breaking, that a man has a face and his name. None of existing VR platforms are made that way and are successful at the same time.
Looking at the new videos related to the upcoming Quest Pro that will be announced next week, the simulavr guys are dead wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AR_MR_XR/comments/xwjzni/meta_quest...
What you're seeing: a Meta headset tethered to a laptop over WiFi running Immersed.
What you're not seeing: a standalone VR headset running a VR Desktop OS natively with bleeding edge pixel density (i.e., like the Simula One).
We understand that Meta has some cool tools in its app store which can be used to get a feel for VR computing. But analogously, you could also purchase word processors for early gaming consoles too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtariWriter
Our view is that dedicated VR computing devices are what the market actually needs.
> Our view is that dedicated VR computing devices are what the market actually needs.
My view is the market needs a product that does not require an internet connection, Facebook account, Microsoft account, windows PC, or equivalent restriction-ware.
Is it really fair to call 8 bit Atari computer line (on which AtariWriter runs) gaming consoles? They had built-in keyboards, had built-in BASIC, would let you attach peripherals like a disc drive or a printer and let you program in assembly. And could be expanded with RAM expansions and 80 column cards. Of course the later XEGS blurred the line but it's also a bit like suggesting the Amiga or Macintosh were not computers because of the Commodore CD32 and Apple Pippin were a thing.
If that image is showing what I think it is (because I might have written a part of it if it is), that's not actually tethered.
Does Simula's tethered option affect this calculus?
A bit, but not much. Our tethered option is for people who want to connect to beefier hosts because they need the extra GPU power (or want to use our headset's high pixel density for gaming purposes). We've sold very few of them though. Our primary offering is our standalone unit.
apple would agree
Wait, is that demo rigged? The keyboard in passthrough is not the keyboard of the MacBook.
Definitely some demo-only things going on there. Pass through keyboard is different, and this person just happens to go in to a meeting where the table is in the same orientation and size as the one in his house/office?
The AR pass through in that clip blows the simulavr pass through wayyyyy out the water!!!
We're working on camera boards now for our AR Mode (it will likely be featured in our an engineering update next week). After our boards are finished (~2-4 weeks), we'll be able to integrate them into our review units for our first integrated camera tests.
That clip is a demo with a heap of demo-magic going on.
Imagine if during the Microsoft antitrust case, they subpoenaed Apple, Compaq, Oracle, Sony and some small startups for their entire short- and long-term business strategy documentation. Oh, and all their user metrics and any telemetry.
Microsoft subpoenaed MCI, AOL, Intel, Novell others, including all email messages related. https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-centers/amd-subpoenas-... https://cyber.harvard.edu/msdoj/archive.html
In that case, "On September 18, 1998, believing that certain statements from Netscape employees reported in Lessons offered succor for its defense, Microsoft subpoenaed the professors' notes, tape recordings and transcripts of interviews, and correspondence with interview subjects. " https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-1st-circuit/1179769.html
Here is Google subpoenaing Microsoft, https://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/microso...
AMD subpoenaing Microsoft, https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-centers/amd-subpoenas-...
Here is a judge standing up an squashing a Microsoft subpoena of Oracle and Sun , https://www.networkworld.com/article/2310247/microsoft-fails...
Oil Price Information Service, a Oil Industry trade publication was subponeaded in a price fixing case to hand over unpublished information, https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/oil-industry-...
>It's hard to focus on multiple things at once, and we're skeptical that the bureaucratic forces in play at a large company like Meta will allow them to do a good job at making their gaming platform also one that people actually want to work in.
The problem with your assertion is that you over count how many multiple things Meta has to do. What will make for a very good gaming VR Headset will also be a very good professional and productivity headset.
The key aspects which Mark Zuckerberg laid out personally in the recent VR Prototypes unveil pretty universally hit both targets. Comfortable light weight headsets with incredible fidelity is desirable for all VR applications. Not just gaming.
Yea… nothing I’ve seen from them is compelling.
My bet is Mark is going to burn a LOT of money, fail to get mass adoption, cancel the project, and lay the design team off.
But who knows! Maybe we’ll all be taking work meetings in MetaLife this time next year! Just make sure you login to your meeting 5 minutes early to preview the new season of BigBrother and score an extra 60 seconds of microphone mute time!
>Yea… nothing I’ve seen from them is compelling.
From Meta or from SimulaVR?
Because Meta has been selling one of the best VR Headsets for the money thus far. I'd really recommend checking out their VR Headsets announcement [1]. Maybe VR will never actually go anywhere software-wise, but it's clear that the team at Meta has a good understand of the problems of current headsets and what would be necessary to make a generational leap in immersiveness.
I'm certain there will be markets for it.
>My bet is Mark is going to burn a LOT of money, fail to get mass adoption, cancel the project, and lay the design team off.
I don't think they're going to cancel it. It's very much a hail marry here. The Facebook phone was a massive flop and the cumulative result of failing to have their own hardware platform was Apple killing their mobile ads business. I think Meta will do everything in it's power to own it's own hardware so that whatever their business model is, no competitor could just kill it with a flip of a switch.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMpWH6vDZ8E
ai driven ads that know exactly what your meeting will be about with virtual copies of the employees cheering the product presented and close ups of the CEO (30 years younger) making a thinking face.
Ben Thompson is fairly bullish on Enterprise Metaverses after having used Workrooms: https://stratechery.com/2021/enterprise-metaverses-horizon-w...
> I don’t want to go too far given I’ve only tried Workrooms out once, but this feels like something real. And, just as importantly, there is, thanks to COVID, a real use case. Of course companies will need to be convinced, and hardware will need to be bought, but that’s another reason why the work angle is so compelling: companies are willing to pay for tools that increase productivity to a much greater extent than consumers are.
I’m a lot less important than Ben but just wanted to +1 that it’s pretty compelling use case once experiencing it. It’s not there yet, mostly due to resolution issues and long term comfort issues, but it’s close enough to show it’s absolutely viable.
I bought the quest2 since it was cheap as a pandemic entertainment device and while I never play it, I regularly wish for a VR monitor (eg a high res nreal air)
What about loss of facial expressivity? I guess whispering to your neighbor works a lot better. And how is the whiteboarding experience?
A lot of Quest games can actually turn audio into mouth movements on an avatar. I play Walkabout Mini Golf with my friends a lot and it's incredible how natural the mouth movements seem to match my friends' speech. I'll turn to them complaining about par on a hole and I'll see them speak in response.
The new Quest headsets are supposed to have some features for facial expression tracking for exactly this reason. But yeah, no doubt there's still a ways to go for the experience to be worthwhile.
I think that Meta actually has facial tracking in one of their VR Headsets. They published a bunch of preliminary demos of stuff in video form a few months back, it's worth checking out.
> Consider that Atari tried to compete with office PCs in the early 80s with their 8-bit family, and failed
I don't think that's very accurate. The Atari ST had a pretty good following compared to personal computers of the time much like the Amiga... The fact is that most computer companies from back then did not survive far beyond the decade but they had their time. So it's not really accurate to say they failed when Acorn, Amiga, Amstrad...etc, all "failed", in that they didn't produce more than a handful of unique and fairly incompatible computers with no clear future, but that had a market and sold with success in their time frame none the less.
I don’t think he meant the computers as a whole were unsuccessful, but the bid to enter the business sector was. The common consensus is they failed because Atari was so strongly associated with games. I assume there are possibly greater reasons, but it is true Tramiel and others tried the pivot and it failed.
"Do a good job" is different from intent to compete. Horizon Workrooms, keyboard passthrough, and multi-app support screams non-entertainment functionality. And that's just what's been released pre-Quest Pro...
As a very nearsighted programmer suffering from increasing age-related farsightedness, I often fantasize about a VR headset that would allow me to comfortably focus (say 6 feet away while wearing contacts) on a huge virtual tmux session for coding.
I don't know if this is even remotely a possibility but it sure would beat dealing with constant CSS (can't see s*t)
IIRC, Nreal Light is 2 m focus distance. Crisp 1080p. Weight/fit... I'd perhaps diy a hat or strap for long-duration use, depending on face shape. Reddit suggests newer Nreal Air is 4 m.
Prescription inserts (we're working with vendors on this) are possible, and the focus distance of our headset (and most headsets, I think) is in that region.
And there are plenty of instances of companies that have gone under when a big parent company decides to incorporate your business as a 'feature' in part of their big monster product.
I'm not saying it's going to definitely happen and the company is doomed or anything, it's certainly possible that SimulaVR will come out on top for productivity devices (or peacefully coexist as an alternative alongside Meta's offering). But it shouldn't ignore what Meta is doing either, especially when they're actively saying they're moving into their turf.
At the very least, it looks like Meta will put up a helluva fight.
Of course anything Meta does is a bit worrisome. I just don't think we're in the same niche-- IMO Meta is fundamentally built on data collection, and VR is just a side effect.
Unless Meta decides to abandon that, I think we'll have a niche.
> IMO Meta is fundamentally built on data collection
Isn’t their whole Metaverse thing a gamble to get away from that? Why does data collection prevent creating a good VR experience. If anything it should align goals well (spend as much time in VR as possible, so as much in VR as possible). Besides, most DataCollection companies offer CollectionFree enterprise contracts… which is where the money for this probably is.
(Btw I’m a huge fan of this sort of product and I hope a respectful company wins.. I’m just skeptical that meta can’t fund their way to success. )
> Isn’t their whole Metaverse thing a gamble to get away from that?
Many of us think Meta is trying to gain as much market as they can early, so they can leverage eye tracking and mm wave tech for very invasive biometric collection and ad targeting in the future. Reasonable minds can disagree on that.
Pretty sure Zuck has said outright that the goal is to own the economy of the metaverse… selling digital stuff and digital places with digital ads and (digital?) media.
It could be a gambit to track your eyes but that seems even harder with worse reward than taking a 30% cut as the next App Store.
> It could be a gambit to track your eyes but that seems even harder with worse reward than taking a 30% cut as the next App Store.
No these are the same thing. Tracking pupil response to stimuli tells advertisers how a human is reacting to what they see. It lets Meta sell a platform to advertisers where they can target humans in particular emotional states, or at certain times when that individual is more likely to make a purchase.
Maybe eye tracking is the fallback plan for when everyone figures out NFTs are the strongest known combination of expensive and valueless.
What? They’re doing VR because they think it’s the basis for the next general computing platform, and owning the platform gives you unlimited access to the user’s data. And in VR, that data includes the user’s gaze, height, physical fitness, high resolution 3D model of their gaming area, and other inferred or measured biometrics. As well as every virtual strip club, naughty video, and indiscreet personal message.
…and access to take a 30% cut when people buy and sell things. Which is probably more profitable and less liable to get legislated away.
This is similar to saying "Facebook is fundamentally built on data collection, and social networking is just a side effect." Technically true, but not much consolation for all the social networks that didn't go all in on advertising and perished.
Wish you the best of luck either way, this is an exciting area and more competition is great. They definitely are competition though.
Yeah, of course, it's a tough space to be in. Just saying that we need to carve out a niche where Meta can't compete vs try to fight Meta head on.
I am failing to see a separate niche here. There are only so many ways you can break down office productivity focus and still have a market to support you. Your team should accept the facts and stop trying to wiggle out of competing with your--frankly--main rival in this space. It doesn't do any justice to avoid this truth. Honestly, I'd be shocked if you weren't already closely monitoring their work and its reaction in the market.
I think Meta's strategy was the right one. The only execs who would even consider adopting a virtual work model would be gamers who are already familiar with the tool. Gaming was their way to get in the minds of their potential next phase enterprise customers.
I totally disagree with this. Early gaming consoles (~70s) took off roughly a decade before early PCs (~80s). Yet many of the people who bought the latter had little interest in the former. They were two completely distinct markets (with some, but clearly not extensive overlap).
We've had many people tell us (often on Hacker News actually) that they're not super interested in VR gaming, but are very interested in VR computing.
(I myself am one of these people BTW; despite working in VR for half a decade now, I have almost no interest in VR gaming, and wouldn't be interested in the field were it not for its enormous potential as a new thinking tool).
Little interest or had they just grown up?
My point is that interest in sci-fi technologies and having some interest (prior or current) in gaming are highly overlapping demographics. Many games explore interactions with future technologies.
Additionally, from a technical perspective of an executive who is looking into VR, "if a headset can provide the fidelity to play games then that would mean it can likely do X and Y complex things my business does"
Based on comments in this thread, SimulaVR thinks of itself the same way Microsoft did when they made Windows phone.
Enterprise loves data collection so that's really a perfect fit for their next phase customer base. That's why I think the Meta account system was important for them to get done pre Quest Pro launch (and significantly early too so any issues are worked out before enterprise demos start)
As someone who used to work there, I would be significantly more afraid.
VR there has never been exclusively about gaming nor has gaming been the overall goal of VR since their acquisition. The way they talked about it back in the day was, if I recall accurately, that they were focused on three pillars: "The metaverse", "The overlay", and "The future of work". Social presence, real-life AR metadata, and expanding the screens and capabilities of working professionals, respectively.
The direction of their research and implementation has, at least to my knowledge, been oriented literally towards creating a new category of general purpose productivity devices and admitting as much in a very public blog post is a pretty big own-goal if the idea is to try to avoid the subpoena by distinguishing yourselves (assuming you're speaking on behalf of SimulaVR).
https://twitter.com/jasuminsui/status/1577867376522973185?t=...
I assume you've read?
I haven't read. Will check it out!
Mark wants to be able to sell apps and ads on his end-to-end controlled platform, that is it.
He missed the boat on browsers and smartphones, so he is aiming for total monopoly of what he believes is the next-big-thing™.
I think this is mixing up the mythology of Zuckerberg with the reality. There's no indication that he is exclusively or even primarily driven by money or power.
Go watch any long-form interview with him, such as with Lex Fridman. It becomes rather clear that he wants to be more like how Steve Jobs is seen by the wider public: as an innovator and pioneer, not as a power-hungry moneymaker.
He isn’t doing a great job at that. I see him as a rather analytical CEO. Nothing of the charisma or clarity of ideas that Steve Jobs had. Steve Jobs was rather ruthless when it came to quality (source : Guy Kawasaki) and no idea how Zuckerberg is irl, but my impression it isn’t favorable.
What I am trying to say is, with how Facebook is managed isn’t at all like Apple.
I think you're mixing up the reality of Zuckerberg and his PR.
I'm still skeptical that it is The Next Big Thing.
I wonder if Zuckerberg suspects it might not be as well but, hey, Hail Mary!
It's a very different experience to how we currently consume media, and I am not really sure it has mass appeal even with some kind of perfect execution. I am prepared to be totally wrong mind you.
It's an incredible tool and way to engage with virtual worlds, but the question we should be asking isn't "Is VR technology good enough" which I think people get stuck on. Really the question is "Does everyone want to be in a virtual world regularly?" and my intuition having spent a good amount of time in VR is that the answer to that is actually no.
I love video games, so much so that I even try to make them. I spend many hours playing in virtual worlds, but I very, very rarely want to use VR. I'm the perfect candidate for the technology, and it's honestly mindblowing when I do use it, but it's just not a casual experience. Even if we had the perfect, unobtrusive and lightweight technology, you are still choosing to disconnect from your current environment and spend time fully engaged with a different world in a way that games and TV don't. That can be really exhausting.
Personally, I think that both TV and movies are going to be driving VR adoption. The Netflix of VR movies could be huge if they were able to offer the right content. A fully virtual theatre that gets new releases could also be big. The edge that VR had in these areas is that it essentially gives you a private theatre that you can enjoy with your friends and family. Leveraging a social network so that you can deliver notifications like “X is currently watching Y. Click to join” would be big. People already kind of do this with watch parties and discord.
I love VR, but it is terrible for things like watching movies. Imagine sitting on your couch and putting on a movie. How often do you do that? If it is more often than 'once in a while', are you actually sitting and watching it intently the entire timee? Are you eating, or drinking anything, or petting your cat or dog, or snuggling on the couch with your SO or kids? You can't do that with a VR headset on because you can't see anything else at all. If you grab for a glass you have to switch to pass-through mode and back again, or take off the headset. You also can't do anything but look at the screen.
It isn't really something that people want to do.
Exceptions of course would be to do it with someone remotely, like a friend or a family member -- it is a good way to potentially 'hang out' with people who aren't physically there. But the same caveats apply.
> Exceptions of course would be to do it with someone remotely, like a friend or a family member -- it is a good way to potentially 'hang out' with people who aren't physically there. But the same caveats apply.
An increasing number of relationships are happening purely remotely. My company went fully remote due to the pandemic and I've started building working relationships, and yes a friendship even, with new employees completely remotely. And I'm a millenial who remembers a distinct separation between the online and offline (and the modem tones lol). (Though I was a very online kid and have made many internet friends over the years.)
Younger relatives of mine don't see as strong a separation and they have friends who they made in primary school that they stayed in touch with despite families moving a long ways away because of how easy remote communication is these days; when I was a kid moving locales meant a new set of friends. It's this demographic and this world that I think is poised to enter VR experiences en masse. Gen X and older Millenials probably still have too strong concepts of "offline" and "online" (and usually prioritize "offline" over "online") to break this barrier down (as you say, a quintessential part of the "offline" experience is snuggling with your dog or an SO) but I'm pretty confident that younger folks won't see this distinction as pronounced. I might be wrong of course.
> younger folks won't see this distinction as pronounced
But they will see it as pronounced because it is pronounced, for all the reasons mentioned.
People love real spaces, real objects, real venues, smells, and atmosphere. The physical characteristics of friends and strangers, from subtle facial cues to outrageous clowning around. In VR, all that is stifled or non-existent; substituted with digitally representation, crafted by unknown processes. Cold origins. Black boxes.
> enter VR experiences en masse
Really? I wouldn't bet on it. The warmth of remote communication you mentioned, is coming from that which we already have. Phones, screens, coffee next to the laptop, simple face to face chats on the screen of your choice. Show me your new house! Cool, walk around carrying phone. Not a VR headset!
Strapping on a headset and embracing rendered distractions while you communicate? I don't see that happening en masse. You'd need to literally get real before VR takes off. Each headset commanding a tiny 360 drone camera, flying wherever you like without incident. See you at Burning Man! From your couch. In this impossible "RR" (remote reality?) future, a typical music festival or live event would have both real people and a bunch of VR drones - somehow inter-mingling, silent without collision, without any issues. Until then, VR is a device strapped to your head, dishing out pre-renders. Your real cat limits the VR experience, and into the bottom drawer goes your headset, right next to the DJI drone you got for Xmas.
I realize you disagree with my take, but if you want to understand it at least, I would suggest trying to steelman my position. The examples you bring up are probably the absolute worst cases for VR and if you judge a technology by its worst cases then nobody would use a technology. Judge an argument by its strongest interpretation, not its weakest.
> People love real spaces, real objects, real venues, smells, and atmosphere. The physical characteristics of friends and strangers, from subtle facial cues to outrageous clowning around. In VR, all that is stifled or non-existent; substituted with digitally representation, crafted by unknown processes. Cold origins. Black boxes.
This same argument could have been used to argue against the Internet, against using the Web to replace real services (how can you replace the minutiae of human voice interaction with a screen??), against the mobile revolution even. Yet mobile phones are here to stay and even developing countries with bad public infrastructure rely heavily on mobile phones to stay connected. Overly broad philosophical arguments never have explanatory power. I think you can make the argument that the experience of VR would make it too cumbersome to use no matter the streamlining, but to attribute some mystical quality to physical connections neglects the sheer growth of the internet, web, and mobile that are extant.
> See you at Burning Man! From your couch. In this impossible "RR" (remote reality?) future, a typical music festival or live event would have both real people and a bunch of VR drones - somehow inter-mingling, silent without collision, without any issues. Until then, VR is a device strapped to your head, dishing out pre-renders. Your real cat limits the VR experience, and into the bottom drawer goes your headset, right next to the DJI drone you got for Xmas.
It's not like mobile phones took over every aspect of our society. My relatives that kept in touch with their young school friends throughout their lives over mobile phones also as adults meet up with their friends IRL. Friends that met partners while playing WoW live with their partners and have started families with them. This isn't an all-or-nothing proposition and suggesting so seems absurd given the prior art we have of digital technologies.
If VR becomes a default way to communicate and collaborate, that's all it will take to "win".
> This same argument could have been used to argue against the Internet
No because we didn't have anything else before the internet other than landline phones, one per household.
In my comment where I said "we already have it", that's the key point. VR is not an incredible shift like mobiles and internet were, and yet your last line flirts with the word "default". Of course it will be popular and clever, and will do well for the special times we want VR by placing a thing on our heads. But like drone cameras, VR will not elbow out the default cameras we already have that work better in most cases.
> but to attribute some mystical quality to physical connections neglects the sheer growth of the internet
Some mystical quality? You say that like "meh, real life"! The internet isn't trying to be "reality", it's just the internet. VR literally has the word reality in its name. Obviously comparisons will be made to actual reality for technologies that use the same word in the name.
> The internet isn't trying to be "reality"
> Obviously comparisons will be made to actual reality for technologies that use the same word in the name.
You are getting distracted by a naming convention. If we called VR something else, without the word "reality" those points don't even make any sense.
VR is not a reality replacement. Like all technology it augments reality.
(I hope my intentionally interesting word choice of "augments reality" doesn't distract you from what the sentence means. As with VR, the meanings of words interpreted as a phrase, vs. interpreted individually, often mean related but different things.)
Virtual reality will be judged based on its own use cases. Given the ergonomics of VR hardware and software are rapidly advancing, seemingly compelling new use cases are being identified with interesting beta's and preliminary-shipping demos, and we haven't even seen a platform that delivers seamless navigation or co-navigation across apps (as the web provides for sites), I would say the potential has hardly been tapped.
This sounds like an argument against TV or movies or the internet. Those things are also substitutes for real life experiences and yet people still spend huge amounts of time with them. VR doesn’t have to preclude the rest of the world. It’s an addition to it. When you don’t have the money or the time or the energy to go out it’s nice to be able to jump into something like VR and have fun with others from the comfort of your home.
If we had to strap our TV to our heads, we'd gravitate to something that didn't require that.
As it stands a "TV" can be a screen of many different sizes and configurations, it can even be a projected image. VR can't be anything but a headset strapped to our heads. That's the point I was making about it's uptake woes... It's obviously fun and will have plenty of users dipping their toe in, or should I say customers, but "en masse" was the point I was replying to and doubting.
What I was trying to communicate in my original post was that VR is not like those mediums on this specific point. It completely removes you from the environment, it provides a lot more immersion but then also takes a lot more commitment to dive into. It only takes me 30 seconds to get the headset on and be in a game, so that's not the issue, it's just an entirely different level of engagement. I almost feel a little guilty when I use VR, because it feels like I'm forgoing the real world. I don't feel that way about games or movies.
That’s odd because I have the opposite feeling. I almost never play regular computer games anymore because I see it as a time sink. I also avoid watching things by myself for the same reason. Playing a VR game or spending time with others in VR feels much more rewarding because I’m using my body instead of sitting in a chair and I feel more engaged with the people I talk to when they are embodied in an avatar and we are present in a space together vs just hearing their voice through headphones.
Well, I do watch movies with others in VR on a fairly regular basis and it’s great. Could be better, headsets need to be more comfortable and pass through has room for improvement but both of those things are on the very near horizon.
Look at the cambria demos, they’re already doing mixed reality by blending the room with the experience. No reason that can’t be used to put your couch, coffee table and SO in the virtual theatre. You also have to consider that a lot of the younger people using these won’t have dogs or kids to worry about.
Sure, it has use cases, but the fact is that something like a phone, or a tablet, or a TV can be used and not used within a fraction of a second as required. Putting on a headset is like going to a movie theater -- it is fine for occasions but it isn't something I can see people wanting to do regularly.
You are thinking with present limitations and I mostly agree.
I can actually take a drink with the headset on but the bulk does make it odd. But these next gen headsets are much more compact. Check out the vive flow, and then the nvidia prototype holographic displays.
If I live in a small apartment or dorm or just don’t have a tv in my room and want to watch anything then that becomes a better choice than holding my extremely heavy iPhone or iPad very soon.
I look forward to the improvements -- like I said, I love VR.
My issue is specifically that it has great use cases (which we have gone over, like gaming and immersion) and mediocre use cases (like socializing) and poor use cases (like replacing a computer for general and work use).
Big leaps in technology that shifted paradigms have been catalyzed by a killer app (ex. spreadsheets for desktop computing) or have been incredibly obvious (ex. long distance real-time communication for telegraph/phone).
Trying to force a technology onto the larger population without one of these things by only advancing the technology itself is not only a waste of money, but tends to backfire and set the public against it for a non-trivial period of time.
I have able to buy Quest 2s locally for a pittance in 'like new' condition because people get them based on the promise of some general utility and end up realizing they are only great at gaming and media consumption, and a lot of people just don't want to wear a headset for those activities.
I thought the idea of future vr is mixed reality, so you could be "present" while experiencing an AR like experience
But what does that mean for movies and games, the type of media most people are likely to consume while in VR? You wouldn't really want your reality mixed with a game you're playing, with exceptions being AR games which vastly limits the possible experiences. It might help for movies, but it also kind of defeats the benefits of VR if you're just watching a flat screen in an AR version of your room.
Well I don't think it's just limited to playing games, the Quest Pro night introduce something like this for example: https://uploadvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Quest-Pro-im...
I can actually see something like that taking off if VR eyewear becomes quite fashionable, and not just in the sense that it looks good, but it becomes trendy to use it.
I think it's more to be used in the home with other vr users online, the pro is supposed to introduce features such as eye, mouth and emotion tracking to make avatars more "real"
This almost describes my experience and perspective perfectly.
Then again, however, a 100b size company — like meta —inevitably has to go for moonshots when their primary source of revenue is steadily declining.
Seems like he has no choice. Even if it doesn’t work or we’re all skeptical — he better play along and go for it.
I think you're right, but I disagree that he has no choice — he can find some other “moonshot”. Pushing VR (or AR) seems like something he thinks will play well with the stock holders; and if he is as skeptical as some of us then he's kind of playing them for rubes.
Hearing them describe their own product as “Chromebook for the face” just reconfirms my suspicious that this is a doomed product.
My bet would be more on AR than VR, and maybe it's not the next big thing but the big thing after the next one.
But that's fine for Meta. Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp might all be running out of growth, but they are all big enough that Meta can afford to invest in something that will only pay off in a decade or two, as long as the payoff is big enough. Gaming-VR headsets are just a good way to get the technology into people's hands right now, and iterate on it.
You can argue that Meta is at the very head of the pack with AR.
See this demo of Quest Pro pass-through AR: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/xvzxj2/new_footage_...
Even if it’s the next big thing you know a better iHeadset will follow months later and be a much better product with less privacy and data theft built in.
Except it will have no games, cost $4k and will probably be difficult to port anything to. Great for Apple’s current mbpro market but ignored by everyone else.
Apple shipped support for WebXR in iOS 16. OpenXR is pretty good standarď and they would greatly benefit from supporting it. Which I think will happen.
(My guess is that Unity (& Blender) will have an on-stage demo when the headset comes out. Unity: “just tick this box and your game will run on Reality Pro”)
People will still line up to buy it, probably me included, I'm a super keen Linux user too.
It doesn't matter if it is the next big thing, or a large flop.
Meta is in trouble, and it needs to do something to retain relevance. This is something, and Meta is doing it.
He probably believes he has the unique ability to make it the next big thing.
If we're defining "missed" as "things released by companies while Facebook was growing to 500k MAUs" :D
>> >...Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and laptops.
> Hate to break it to you, but if you don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is actively trying to create VR devices that are general-purpose productivity devices aimed at replacing PCs and laptops, you haven't been watching some of their recent videos about the new headsets and prototype headsets they're working on. He very much is aiming for that market with future devices (not the Quest 2).
It sounds like they're saying that Meta doesn't currently sell anything that competes with what they're currently selling, and the info you give doesn't seem to contradict that. I'd question the premise that releasing a marketing video for a product that doesn't exist counts as being "in competition". They might be in competition in the future, but it doesn't seem like they are right now.
This is a weird take considering that simulavr is still taking preorders and doesn't plan to ship until 2023. They both have non-existent products right now
Or maybe I'm wrong and they are already selling a product? I didn't see it on the website.
There is a segment that uses the virtual desktop with the oculus quest 2 quite extensively, so you still have that argument with their current lineup of devices IMO.
If I am not wrong, this is an antitrust suit, meaning it is about what they are selling, not what they are developing. If the product has been launched, there literally cannot be a monopoly.
They are both selling VR headsets. Claiming they are not competitors is like trying to claim electric cars are not in competition with gas powered cars because they are different technology.
Well.... I mean... we do consider trucks and cars to be different markets. And they are often the same technology. Same for passenger trucks to long haul trucks. Fundamentally same technology, but very different markets.
You can also build mountains made out of dogshit, but as it turns out the target market for that is zero. Zuck can’t make it.
Maybe I've just been on a too-long coding stretch, but speaking for myself, it's just really unsavory to read so much "red/blue"-style sloganism around the big tech companies. Obviously I'm biased because I worked for one, and so I saw up close the process that produces the decisions that seem to routinely generate comment threads with people comparing Google/FB/MSFT/etc. to e.g. "Satan".
It's just not that simple folks: and a hallmark of why this forum is great is that we tackle "not that simple" with a relentless curiosity rather than 1-bit generalizations.
I routinely whack these megacorps for their shady dealings. But this "Marg bar Āmrikā" shit is an unflattering look for such a thoughtful community and it ignores that huge parts of this community are a direct personal object of very nasty remarks made "in general" on a fairly daily basis.
People are quite pleased to enjoy the corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps: try saying something bad about Kubernetes if you don't believe me.
It's not a 1-bit thing, and Hacker News is Hacker News because when people (and I've been that guy) throw rocks, we demand better.
I agree, and just want to reiterate what was written in the article: we genuinely feel no animosity towards Meta and its gaming headsets. We don't even feel animosity that they have leveraged their economies of scale to provide them very cheaply to consumers (something we aren't able to do yet[1]). We just disagree with their product vision, and are pursuing our own. We also think subpoenaing us for this case seems unreasonable.
[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-is-the-simula-one-so-expensive...
I suspect that with all such things, that a hacker's opinion on the relevant law is probably `/r/ConfidentlyIncorrect`.
I have no opinion on the substantial legal matters at question. It's been my observation that the ranking folks at Meta in the VR world are as ethical as fiduciary obligation permits, but YMMV.
I thank you for your reply and hope that you agree that a substantial legal matter which will inevitably be resolved by people competent to do so shouldn't become a political football in a small but influential forum of people who on average know as little about IP law as I do :)
Wether it's reasonable or not is orthogonal to the law. It's not because something is legal that it should be a thing. I think that whether or not this is legal, the idea Meta can access internal documentation from a smaller competitor is unreasonable.
Sure, but do we even know what the law currently says on this matter? I've seen a lot of speculation in the comments here, but very few facts. Even the original blog post seems to have been written before consulting an attorney.
For example, does the law have any mechanism for compensating SimulaVR for their work on this case? What mechanisms exist for appeal? Does Meta have free reign to examine the subpoenaed documents, or are there restrictions on how that information can be used and who can see it?
It just seems to me you ought to know what the law says first before arguing it needs to be changed. Chesterton's Fence and all that...
GET OFF THE INTERNET AND HIRE A LAWYER TO HANDLE THIS
You guys want to run a business, well, start acting like businessmen. Your company will occasionally get subpoenaed or - heaven forbid! - be sued. You got a third-party subpoena for documents in a litigation. Guess what, this will happen from time to time. Your attorney should be negotiating with Meta to figure out what documents/testimony your company will provide.
Honestly, your behavior makes me question your maturity. Treat this as a learning experience about the reality of the American business/legal world. Get a lawyer to handle it and shut up about the case.
Presumably they did get a lawyer, but I don't see why they should get off the Internet.
If Meta is going to use the legal system to bully tiny startups that tangentially compete with them, they might as well take a bit of a PR hit for doing it.
The parent is already going grey via downvotes, which I think is a bit harsh: "hire a lawyer and let them hire PR people" is in fact generally good advice.
This thread is 1 part "this isn't the place to litigate this" and 2 parts "i've got a beef with big tech", so it's unlikely to be germane and therefore the all caps are likely to be a bit much.
But it's good advice generally, and that shouldn't be downvoted.
Hiring a lawyer was the first thing we did. For the rest, I'd gladly do this if we had the funds to do so. We don't.
Plus, we as a company are (maybe excessively) open. Of course we're going to get involved in legal proceedings, that's a fact of life. Doesn't mean we won't talk about it.
In my highly uninformed view, you're thus far in the clear near as my uninformed, ignorant ass can tell.
But the GP's advice is still as good as when it was printed: for the most part, the under-resourced party is courting nothing but trouble by courting public opinion litigation.
Do talk to a lawyer, don't say more than you can help on the Internet. It's good advice.
> corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps
This is a fallacy: It's possible comparable open source contributions could have been made without the graces of the corporates.
For example: The giants tend to buy out their competition early, so how could it mature enough to be able to contribute comparably, or possibly better, to open source?
IMHO the open source contributions of these companies are a form of tech-washing, regardless of the honest and best intentions of their employees.
There really isn't any way to confirm or refute that kind of argument. What would happen if regulation or social norms or whatever prevented big tech companies from existing? I don't know and (frankly) you don't either.
I use emacs a dozen plus hours a day, and GNU wouldn't exist if RMS hadn't been bullied at the lunch room in the MIT AI Lab. Would the world be a better or worse place if he didn't have a personal jihad against Symbolics draped in a GNU bumper sticker?
I don't know.
I'm kind of confused but maybe it's my age. My career ran parallel to the birth of open source and it was explicitly a reaction against megacorps behavior and practices.
The participation in it part is newer, they were initially very hostile (I was warned any number of times aligning strategies against oss projects incase it was 'detrimental to my career')
The thing about reading GNU mailing lists is that they're so, I don't know, intimate or something. They're freely available for anyone to read, but community members talk so openly on them that you feel like you're wire-tapping someone's living room.
I've had enough professional stuff on the line to need to pay attention to GNU over the years even though it always creeped me out a little bit, and I don't see how anyone can read them without concluding that Stallman feeling personally slighted was the reason he went on the crusade, and the software freedom thing was a reasonably comfortable paintjob.
He got picked last for Symbolics, the LMI people didn't really want him around either but were getting clobbered on defense contracts so they kind of couldn't turn down his code (he's a great hacker), and the rest is sort of history until Linus comes along right?
Yeah, I agree. I distinctly remember open source becoming more corporate as the years got by, and corporate becoming more open source aligned.
Of course, but you don't know either. So your argument that these (or equivalent) contributions wouldn't exist without the megacorps doesn't hold.
It's dramatically easier to prove to a reasonable observer that Kubernetes got lifted off the ground by a bunch of folks on Google payroll than it is to prove that some GNU diehard would have inevitably sold that (silly) idea to like a zillion people if only Google didn't beat them to it.
I make these sort of observations with a certain regret: I was a kid already pushing the limits on a DOS-type machine when you could first get Slackware media: the GNU userspace has been home since before I ever woke up next to a girl.
But it's kinda over now. LLVM vs. GCC is a desperate rearguard action, the Rust people have broken the mindshare monopoly on shared libraries that was insulating `glibc` from it's better (`musl` in almost every case is better), old-timers like me are me are a bit attached to emacs and bash, but neovim and fish are pretty fucking good.
GNU and free software in general are no longer superior by virtue of Sun Microsystems leaning too hard into the JVM: they've got to work for it now, and they're getting their asses kicked.
That's taking it to extreme, though. It's possible that a large number of medium companies, for instance, would have the same open source yield as the megacorps who just bought them out (in our reality). Especially if it were easier for them to attract more talented engineers, which would be the case if the big companies had less of a grip on the existing market (e.g. if Meta were forced to split up, as regulators push for)
Sidebar: I don't know what "tech-washing" means. When I see that a company is laundering some bias or some social advantage through a machine learning model I just call it money laundering, because the inputs and outputs are both money and I think we've coined enough new victimhood words per year every year for many years.
If a company is profiting off it's "open-source" contributions, getting out more than it's putting in, then it's washing money through GitHub I guess. That's fair.
But "tech-washing" has this implication that any computer hacker is in a bad way, which is just silly: back when we had to go to the office the freeway overpasses we drove on had tent encampments under them.
Take that up with the Ayn Rand idiots who are not uncommon in these parts.
By "techwashing" I mean using some of the money a company makes in its main business (which in the case of Meta and some other corporates has a bad impact on society) to make a positive technical contribution to the public , thus helping existing and prospective employees work there with less of a guilty conscience.
Similar, to e.g. a pharmaceutical company raising the price of a medicine excessively, but then donating some of the money to build a hospital.
It's just that in the case of tech companies, the reputation washing is done via technical contributions.
> People are quite pleased to enjoy the corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps
I used to be in that boat. But after seeing where Chrome ended up, and how this affects the web today, I can't help but think that long-term, we'd be better off if the megacorps disappeared together with the funding.
I think you're giving HN too much credit. Threads involving certain topics (e.g. big tech) are completely overrun with snark and hate that I don't see much of the relentless curiosity you're talking about.
Agreed, it has become more and more frequent that HN threads are overrun by comments that seem more like they're straight out of reddit or even just your local newspaper comment section. With all the snark or aggressive dismissive pessimism they involve.
It's really sad to see because I love the HN comment section for how easily you can say a thing and everyone understands there's nuance and lots of angles to address the topic.
I've made posts about an app and the author appears curious about the issue (I'm not asking for support, just fun that folks are curious). Other people who understand the complexity (or just that there is complexity) involved are around to explore the issue / ask great questions.
Where other places the response would be the typical cynical "Oh that's just because they want you to upgrade!" and so on.
In fairness: if you talk shit on Rust here you're in for a stomping, but if you praise Rust on `/r/programming` you're in for the same stomping by a different crowd ;)
I know what you're talking about in only the way that someone who too often has been part of the problem can :)
But this forum is coming up on two decades and has like one or two full-time moderators and somehow remains an island of rational discourse in an Internet full of "I'm trained in gorilla warfare".
It has it's good days and it's bad days, (just as I do as a participant) but I think it's pretty unique.
Yeah it's definitely been making me pull my engagement back on HN. It even motivated me to get onto Twitter lol. At some point I want to read something a bit more stimulating than Tech Nextdoor. I originally came here from Digg and Slashdot because I enjoyed talking with other engineers and founders in the weeds, but I think the HN crowd has drifted far away from that start.
That said the conversation quality here on the non-hellthreads is still quite high. I enjoyed the thread on C yesterday. It's just that hellthreads and strident comments "feel" like they're becoming the norm here and it's harder to escape from them.
Yeah I have a mental denylist of HN terms at this point where I just avoid reading hn comments. In contrast to some topics where I can't wait to see discussion, those still exist, but these days (I say that like it's new, but it's been like this a while) they are fewer.
I think its good for the society as a whole to always view Mega Corps. which have more money than several governments combined with suspicion, Because even when they get punished for their 'shady dealings' the fines are usually a rounding error for their weekly revenue; Meta's recent $400M fine for Instagram not protecting children's data comes to mind.
Public opinion on the brand seem to hold more accountability than the courts for these Mega Corps, After all Facebook did become Meta FWIW.
> try saying something bad about Kubernetes if you don't believe me
Kubernetes is an absolute mess, and I would never willingly subject myself to it.
If a humongous corporation is giving something away for free, it’s either because it suits their agenda, or because it’s so irrelevant to them they do not care.
But maybe, and hear me out here, FB deserves the shade.
FB definitely deserves some shade: the “move fast and break things” philosophy is real, and they’ve (we’ve) played fast-and-loose with things we didn’t fully understand, some of that ended very badly.
But as megacorps go, FB seems to have had a “come to Jesus” moment on those kinds of mistakes and done a hard pivot to a more responsible and adult posture. It was built by people barely out of childhood, certainly I was still a child when I worked there and putting a 20-something in charge of a powerful company is going to create some collateral damage. No one can say with a straight face that FB hasn’t fucked up more than once or twice.
But those kids grew up a bit, whether via altruism or pragmatism have decided to step quite a bit more carefully, and unlike 10 years ago, FB is probably closer to “don’t be evil” than Google is. It’s still a ruthless megacorp answering to shareholders, but I wouldn’t say that in 2022 it’s even close to the worst of the bunch.
unfortunately it looks like many internet threads lose their nuance and devolve into black and white, and HN is no exception
I'm sorry you don't like our tone.
Hey, I've been around here a long time and I mouth off more often than most: no moral judgements from me.
But yeah, it's a pretty gritty tone and at times it tends to blur a bit with the complaints about the interviews being too hard and the pay being too high, which isn't an awesome vibe.
I'm the last person to judge someone for shooting off, I get heated myself, but I try to be honest about what exactly the pebble in my shoe is.
Well that is unfortunate. I would not want to be in Simula's position, I'm sure they've got enough on their plate without having to deal with stuff like this that they barely have an impact on in the first place.
I understand that Meta needs to prove they're not a monopoly, and apparently the way to do that is through other companies laying their cards on the table, but my goodness would I feel uncomfortable giving core business plans, outlooks, and associated data to a huge (and arguably unethical) company like Meta.
It's unreal that this is just a thing that can be done, but I'd expect those documents to never reach the eyes of anyone who guides business decisions at Meta. Or so I hope. Or maybe this kind of information isn't as sensitive as I think, I don't run a business and have no plans to currently, so I'm not savvy in that department.
Surely if Meta need another company to help them prove something, Meta should have to compensate them. Sure, the government should be able to COMMAND a company to appear, but for one legal entity to COMMAND another legal entity to perform work and make an appearance at a place, in my mind as a Brit, seems entirely wrong.
Time to throw my Quest on eBay, not sure I want to be a part of this.
I thought it was clear in the post that Meta is being compelled by the federal government to prove they are not a monopoly and as part of this they need to present a case where they establish they have legitimate competitors. This requires information about the competitors.
The federal government is compelling action.
Yes and I’m compelled to rob a gas station because the government has compelled me to pay property taxes /s
This is typical for court cases. Even if a party may have little to do with what’s going on trial, if they’re a relevant party in any way they can get sucked in and be forced to give a deposition. It’s totally possible to “plead the 5th” here, but the rationale here is all the relevant facts to a case have to be brought to light in order to make an informed judgment.
> in my mind as a Brit, seems entirely wrong.
I guess Meta is following the "If you have money, you are not wrong" strategy.
There is no need for the executives at Meta to see these documents themselves to derive value from them. A lawyer seeing them and providing a verbal summary is more than good enough when deciding on strategy.
> I understand that Meta needs to prove they're not a monopoly, and apparently the way to do that is through other companies laying their cards on the table, but my goodness would I feel uncomfortable giving core business plans, outlooks, and associated data to a huge (and arguably unethical) company like Meta.
This seems too considerate to Meta. IMO, part of Meta's intention is to hurt SimulaVR. It wouldn't be by accident.
IANAL, but it came from a court because it's a court order. Failing to respond would be contempt of court - an imprison able offense.
AIUI, the reason that courts order cooperation for this sort of thing is that every party deserves the right in court to defend themselves as best as is possible. If in order to defend themselves they require information that they cannot present themselves but that someone else can (say your alibi was being at work - your boss could confirm that), then it becomes that party's civic duty to cooperate with the courts and make sure that the appropriate information can be yielded to ensure a just decision. If there are concerns about cost or potential secrecy/privacy implications, someone who is subpoenaed can bring that up with the judge who can then work with all parties to appropriately manage the situation.
> then it becomes that party's civic duty to cooperate with the courts
How is that compatible with the 5th amendment?
The (relevant part of the) 5th amendment does not say "you never have to cooperate with the courts" it says you can not be compelled to incriminate yourself. People and companies are compelled to cooperate with courts all the time - that's literally what a subpoena is.
> it says you can not be compelled to incriminate yourself.
and who decides if you can or cannot incriminate yourself?
Btoh you and the justice system. You could plead the fifth on personal incrimination, but that may result in an investigation into your personal matters now that you've indirectly hinted that the facts you were asked to present could indicate wrongdoing.
The system could also consider your testimony to be so important as to proclaim that you shall not be prosecutable for anything that you say as part of your testimony.
Of course, all of this applies only to things within your mind. You cannot use the 5th to get out of presenting any and all existing materials that may even be perceived to be relevant to the court order. That's likely to be as initially broad as emails, business plans and documents, road maps, etc. Obviously, impeding these efforts would be contempt of court or (in the case that you destroy anything) possibly worse.
In practice though, your attorney works with the court and other parties' attorneys to identify what exactly would be relevant to the case and if any special secrecy regarding those materials and testimony is warranted. Case gets worked out, life moves on.
Why does it matter how other companies are to their point?
It's a feckless misdirection
green name has a point though.
The way to get better behavior is to point out bad behavior wherever you see it, not shrug and treat it like a broken stair.
> not shrug and treat it like a broken stair.
When all but 2 of the stairs are broken in a flight -- discussing the particularities of this break or that isn't very meaningful or productive. Perhaps the 2 functional stairs are worth another look instead.
I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size
so it's a disengineous point to bring up.
the deeper realization is that is not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards such as being ethical.
this is more important in other discussions around rights of corporations (and other comparalby powerful institutions) in contrast with the righs of human individuals (see also: censorship by 'private persons' but this person is google or something)
but let's just bury my ancestor reply before going any deeper. gosh.
>so it's a disengineous point to bring up.
It is a perfectly valid point in terms of the impact on SimulaVR which is what this discussion is about. A company is trying to get sensitive information from them. Stating the company is unethical even if all other similar companies are as well is perfectly valid.
How can it be unethical if this is how it's done across the board in the US? Meta's lawyers aren't bringing in some unheard of tactic here. This is par for the course. I'd love to hear some "ethical" means for proving without doubt that you have competitors. Admittedly I wouldn't be a good judge of their usability in court, mind.
The other piece that I think the parent was making is that how can we judge this practice as somehow speaking to the ethicalness of a broader company when the decision making process doesn't work or act like a single mind (which is how we perceive ethics to work, an internal/personal decision wherein you way the good, bad, etc)?
"To prove we have competitors, we will pull them into a legal battle they otherwise are not a part of, so we can make sure their business plans aren't something that would make them actual competitors in the future"
That's what Meta's subpoena sounds like.
> so it's a disengineous point to bring up.
In the public eye, Meta is particularly unethical. It's a large part of their current downfall. So I don't agree with you that it is a disingenuous point.
facebook tried to provide equal and fair (market driven) access to political influence through their ad-platform; and they will be punished for doing so (see the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and subsequent relentless waves of bad PR against them).
political influence is not open, nor fair, nor market driven. is power driven; and the power is trying to re-assert this harsh truth.
and when I say "the power" I refer to the powerful people and their institutions who can make a political example a lá Julian Assange; the kinds of institutions and secretive traditional societies who can make somebody commit "suicide" in a federal prison; or get somebody in a presidential seat. facebook is in for a rough ride.
powers who would ally with china in secret "in order to better all of society". powers whose only competence is keeping power, but not making power nor doing anything good with it. powerful institutions (of autonomous self-maximizing money) who know war, and war is what they will use their power for (and whence their power comes).
in another point in history I would be meeting some assassins pretty soon for daring to publish this in a semi-public forum. now all I get is dissuaded ("You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.") and buried in with the noise/spam and the garbage ([shadow]banned).
This is the weirdest comment.
Genuine insight sandwiched between a “Cambridge Analytica was FB being virtuous” opener and an oddly paranoid closer.
thank you, I try my best.
the "FB as virtues" is an insight I glimpsed through Stratechery's analysis of Facebook's woes [1].
> All news sources are competing on an equal footing; those controlled or bought by a party are not inherently privileged.
> The likelihood any particular message will “break out” is based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it. The power has shifted from the supply side to the demand side.
> on Facebook both small companies and large companies have an equal shot at customers, and both Party insiders and complete outsiders have an equal shot at voters.
so then, apparently democracy is good, justice is good, but everything is better in moderation, including these 'good' things.
the algorithmically driven market made all participants far more equal than they wanted to be; so they decided to destroy it.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2021/facebook-political-problems/
~I'll see myself back into the psychiatric ward.~
> not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards such as being ethical
What? Care to explain that a bit further.
A multibillion dollar company should be held to higher standards than an individual
yet, they somehow get away with shitty actions which would be unaceptable from an individual.
they are limited liability institutions after all, the reasoning for their existence is precisely to limit the liabilities (negative consequences of their actions)... that's where the tax-payer comes in.
What makes it not fair? Arguably if we can't hold a company to be ethical, wouldn't the individual concept of "fairness" also be off the table?
> I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size
Sounds to me like an argument for breaking up Facebook.
This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire competing organization to do market research for Meta. It is clever and evil, and nothing anybody says after this will make me think that Meta is not anti-competitive nor that they have an once of ethics. As a consumer, I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products; I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google.
This seems like a wildly emotional response that is completely out of line with what is being asked.
The FTC is suing Meta, and it has a right to get other companies to admit that they are in fact competitors to Meta in the VR Space. SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:
"Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs"
Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
> SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:...
> Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
Part of the antitrust action is determining the boundaries of the market.
If company A has a monopoly in market X, and company B competes in related market Y, ... the fact that company A intends to enter market Y does not mean company B is preventing company A from having a monopoly in market X. (But if X and Y are the same market, they are!)
Right, so you can imagine this evidence would be useful to Meta if the boundaries were drawn differently than how you are imagining.
At the same time, you can imagine that SimulaVR wants to assert "we are not proof META isn't a monopoly". Further, they probably don't want to provide key market information that could aid an aggressive monopolist from leveraging their way into SimulaVR's space.
Simula may not want to hurt meta (a competitor) when that competitor is burning billions in cash to prop up a VR market. They may benefit from a growing consumer awareness and UX research.
What they may or may not desire is less relevant in the face of what external bodies compel them to do
Not sure if "wildly emotional" is fair to them either.
> In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively".
But I agree, the post does seem similar to an individual trying to get attention for their cause, ie. 'Google locked me out...'. To me the tone is probably trying to help sell their narrative of them being this small thing not worth subpoenaing.
> nothing anybody says after this will make me think
This is clearly wildly emotional and (hopefully) hyperbolic.
I feel like they should pay SimulaVR's lawyer fees though. Why would SimulaVR be forced to spend resources to help Meta prove it's not a monopoly
This. Further, if any other company or person can be compelled to give up their private data against their will, and perform actions and expend resources and rob from their actual jobs they need to be doing, then it for damned sure shouldn't be in service to anyone who they have no relationship with. The court should be the only ones able to do that, and the government should have to pay for it (meaning you and I of course, which means they should only do it if there is some reason that benefits us all) and any private data strictly controlled and only handled managed by the court or some agreed 3rd party.
It makes no sense at all that any company can use another to defend itself like that.
As far as I can see Meta should hire researchers to assemble data about the state of the market from public data.
Or even further, really whoever is charging Meta should have to bear that burden of collecting that data to prove it.
If corporations are people then they are innocent until proven guilty. If corporations are not people then GREAT! We have a lot of old cases I would love to see unwound that hinged on that ridiculous idea. But they can't be both at different times, and still claim to have a system that has any integrity and that we should respect.
It is a thing to bill US Federal LE for data retrieval related to subpoenas and investigations.
It does seem like if there are collateral subpoenas from FTC action, the feds should foot the bill.
Facebook's asking for too much, business plans from over 100 companies? LOL
The latter is a different target market though.
Eyeroll. Meta did nothing wrong here. This isn't them going after their competition; they're the defendant in this lawsuit. As the article says:
> In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively". So naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
To the extent that you have a problem with the subpoena, blame the judge who authorized it, or perhaps the legal system that makes such subpoenas possible. Meta is not the aggressor here.
Facebook is very much the aggressor -- in response to the FTC suit, their immediate response was to try and use the courts to strong-arm hundreds of competitors into giving up massive troves of highly sensitive commercial secrets without any kind of formal protection, such as limiting document review to FB's outside counsel. It's ridiculous, it's abusive, it's overbroad, and it's transparently an effort to burden Facebook's competitors while snowing the FTC with massive amounts of paper.
What would you have had them do instead? Again:
> naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
They don't have a right to see secret documents other people have. We'll see.
That's not how litigation works. If SimulaVR wants protection, it has to ask for it. SimulaVR has the right to ask 1) Meta and 2) the court to limit the scope of the subpoena and to set conditions on the review and distribution of the production. If Meta agrees to the conditions, great, the agreement can either be informal, or incorporated into an order for the judge to sign. If Meta is opposed, SimulaVR gets to make their case to the judge and let him decide scope and protective order details.
Welcome to the American legal system. Facebook did nothing wrong here. When I was an attorney and involved with these kinds of subpoenas, we always worked with the third-parties to make document production less burdensome for them. SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
Welcome to the American legal system.
This isn't as strong a justification as one might imagine. That system sucks in many ways. Recently we learned that DoJ routinely take every document held by particular targeted law firms, without warrants, and then designate "taint teams" of DoJ lawyers who view every document and suggest which ones should be seen by investigators. [0] The idea is that the taint team will forget all the documents they've seen when they later investigate other clients of the targeted law firms. Many judges have ordered this practice stopped, but DoJ DGAF.
This taint team concept obviously is unconstitutional and undermines justice, but ISTM the practice you describe is worse. When Meta's lawyers view documentation extracted from SimulaVR, they do so as agents of Meta. Their current stated goal may be to defend Meta in the present suit, but there's no reason to believe that's the only goal they'll ever have. Have Meta promised to throw away all documents after some of them have been presented to the court? Is there some sort of escrow concept that allows SimulaVR to trust someone other than Meta's lawyers? The danger to SimulaVR is actually greater if Meta are telling the truth that they are competitors!
If Meta actually were competitors of SimulaVR, it would be easy to show that by hiring an expert to testify that "this service and/or product sold by SimulaVR competes with this other service and/or product sold by Meta". The sort of thing described in TFA has other purposes.
[0] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-justice-department-was-dan...
We aren't throwing a hissy fit lol. We're just stating the facts and are working with our lawyers to resolve this.
You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
Look, I get that you guys are a small shop but you should not be surprised to be asked to provide evidence in an antitrust litigation over the VR market. I'm guessing you haven't seen a subpoena before - they are all like this, and your attorneys will be able to negotiate something much less burdensome.
So get off Hacker News and let your lawyers handle it.
We made our weekly blog post about it (because it's worth talking about, IMO) and someone else posted it on HN. It blew up and we're responding to comments as necessary.
We're letting our legal counsel handle the actual details, the rest is just talking about it.
> You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
They didn't make a site to complain; it's their blog by which they're informing buyers and potential buyers of anything that can affect their progress. It also doesn't matter who shared on HN. Any HN user with an interest in them would have shared something this significant, like I was about to.
hah these sorts of comments definitely smell like there are HNers who likes FAANG money and wanna defend their patrons
> You made a site complaining about the subpoena [..] I'm guessing you haven't seen a subpoena before - they are all like this
If everyone kept their mouths shut as you suggest, we wouldn't know about how rotten the legal system is until it was our turn at the gallows.
why not just respond to their subpoena with one line answers....
Responding to any legal request without legal counsel is a good way to fuck yourself up. There's no "just do x" unless you enjoy playing with fire.
>When I was an attorney and involved with these kinds of subpoenas, we always worked with the third-parties to make document production less burdensome for them.
>SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
Question:
Is meta's lawyers bound in any way to treat simulaVR the same way you treated your subpoenaees?
I don't even care if they do, or would, the question is, are they legally bound to do so? If not, that's a systemic issue.
I suspect the answer is no they aren't, and the burden is on the subpoenaees to convince the court to limit the burdensomeness of the subpoena, which is itself a burden that is unacceptable.
>SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
Well then Meta's attorneys should contact SimulaVR directly instead of sending them a legal letter.
> Meta did nothing wrong here
Doesn't this depend on whether Meta is actually guilty of what the FTC is accusing them of? If they are, then clearly the wrong thing they did was behave anti-competitively.
If they are guilty of that, then it is fair to blame them for being dragged into their defense. While everyone has the right to defend themselves, it is fair to be upset at having to be called in the defense of someone who broke the law.
I'm not defending Meta, but what constitutes anti-competitive behaviour is often hard to define and requires a court process to ultimately decide - it's not a binary state one can easily recognize having entered or exited. If it was, many kinds of legal issue wouldn't need nearly as much court time.
Until a Court process says otherwise, Meta have done nothing wrong here.
Personally, I don't think there's any possible doubt that Meta/Facebook has behaved anti-competitively in a variety of ways over the years; the fact that they haven't been taken to task for this is largely because of the Chicago doctrine's absurd principle that such things only matter if they increase prices for consumers.
Obviously if the court rules they acted anti-competitively then yeah that would count as "doing something wrong", but I don't think it makes sense to call their legal defense itself evil. As you said, Meta has a right to defend itself in court, just like anyone.
Stealing secret plans from companies under the guise of being the POOR VICTIM!
> I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products
I made this mistake and ordered an Oculus earlier this year. While I waited for it to arrive, I setup a facebook/meta account since that is a requirement. Before the headset arrived, Meta had flagged my account as fake, and the process to prove that I was in fact a real person would not accept my cell phone number. There was nothing else I could do to prove I was real. So, fake me returned the headset when it arrived, and then fake me felt a sense of relief in the giant bullet I had just dodged.
This is a subpoena from a legal team, NOT a court. You are free to write “we don’t know” for much of the questions or even write “too burdensome to answer”. Such subpoenas have little teeth.
Hire a lawyer for a few hours to confirm what I say since I’m some random internet guy.
From the article:
We've also been commanded to drop everything we're doing and go tesify on these matters _in person_, thousands of miles away from us, by the stated deadline :|
So it's not just a matter of writing "we don't know". They have to produce a lot of material and then travel 1000's of miles to show up in the court in person.
This shows that SimulaVR is run by a bunch of children. Every subpoena says this, but you work with the attorneys to figure out the time and manner that works best for the deposition. I routinely flew thousands of miles to do depositions in places that worked best for the deposed.
And complaining about how the subpoena's asking for tons of documents. Again, every subpoena does this; you have to negotiate with the attorneys on the other side to figure out what they actually want. If SimulaVR was suing Meta, then yeah, Meta will play hardball. But they're a third-party here - chances are, attorneys for Meta are looking for very specific things (namely, economics to support Meta's arguments about the VR market) and SimulaVR will be able to negotiate a way to provide that info without turning their company inside and out.
And if you are asking WHY SimulaVR should be required to provide ANY info at all... well, that's the American legal system. Courts and parties have broad power to obtain evidence from third parties.
Basically, SimulaVR needs to grow up and hire lawyers to handle this.
I'm not typically one to point at the HN guidelines, but you could have made your points and been informative without the insults. It's not helping anything and leading to otherwise unnecessary defensive back-and-forths.
> This shows that SimulaVR is run by a bunch of children [...] SimulaVR needs to grow up and hire lawyers to handle this.
It wasn't SimulaVR who responded to you, so why respond by insulting SimulaVR for the comment of someone else? They've already got legal counsel:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111249
All SimulaVR did in their blog post is state the facts. They haven't refuted the point you said, and may be already looking into that.
So what if they don't have the funds? What if they have only so much for this but then have to close the business down because of it? It's a small startup.
You. Work. With. The. Attorneys.
Why is this so hard to grasp. This subpoena is to get certain market information. SimulaVR can negotiate with Meta to provide the information in a way that's not super burdensome for them. I did this all the time when I was a lawyer.
SimulaVR is a FRIENDLY WITNESS for Meta, since they can presumably provide evidence that Meta operates in a competitive VR market. This means Meta's lawyers will be very accommodating to get the info they need.
And yeah guess what, you need to hire lawyers from time to time when you run a business. Just like you need to hire accountants. It sucks but that's how things are.
Judging by the responses in this thread, it seems like many folks on HN have never worked with an attorney before (which isn't too surprising).
Do you have any advice on how to find a competent attorney with reasonable fees who can do the specific work that you need done? The one time I had to do this for my business on short notice, I used Yelp and Google, and it was somewhat disastrous. I think it would be really helpful for me, and a lot of other folks, to know the right way to do this.
Unfortunately I think word of mouth is the best way to find good attorneys. Ask people who run similar businesses as you who they use? If there's a chamber of commerce in your city or town, you could ask them for references.
I'll chime in to say that I was very happy with @grellas's firm in Silicon Valley. I found them the right mix of startup-friendly and competent in tech issues. (grellas.com).
Thank you!
Haha friendly witness. Please hand over your current and future business plans over. What could possibly go wrong. Does nobody here see how that could backfire with Meta having such insight on your business?
If Meta is so friendly they should pay the legal fees for the lawyers that they're forcing Simula to hire.
Lol, you mean trusting Meta's people? That's insane.
All the accounting you need to do at the beginning of your business can be done by yourself, or very cheaply. Fighting Meta's claim to your business secrets is not going to be cheap.
You charge them time and materials, and cap it. Or ignore it. Best to just write back that they are too small, no revenue, no funding.
Ignore the tone of these things. Legal is commanded to write in this manner.
Simula isn't even an American company.
So what if they are children? Fuck children?
They received a letter that looks important and official to them, and looks to them like something they have to comply with.
Are you giving legal advice to ignore letters from lawyers?
> Are you giving legal advice to ignore letters from lawyers?
The only advice I saw them give was to hire lawyers to help them deal with it.
They called them children and by inference incompetent to operate a business, because they took what the letter says at face value.
My question is a logical extension of that.
I was once subpoenaed by the state of New York. It was worded similarly, asking for a bunch of information and my personal appearance. I have never lived or worked in New York, and at the time was just a broke college student, so taking time off school to fly there would be more than an inconvenience. The information they sought was related to a fraud case, and their fraudster had bought something from one of my websites in the past. After I actually talked to the investigators over email, they never actually expected me to travel to New York, they were just looking for dates and IP addresses relating to these sales, which I emailed and my participation in their investigation was over. They didn't actually want me to go to New York, that was just boilerplate.
When I read the pompous first sentence of a US subpoena “COMMANDING” the recipient to do something, I like to think of it as a direct order from Vigo the Carpathian[0]
[0] https://gfycat.com/forthrightredfurseal
You’re missing the point. The source of the subpoena is important. Subpoenas from lawyers are not something you have to answer completely. They have no teeth. They are not from a court of law.
These specific people are being compelled to do that or the company is being compelled to show up in person? Those are wildly different demands. I find it hard to believe that specific productive employees of the company are being compelled to show up in court rather just some hired legal representatives of the company.
Right, but hiring a legal representative is going to be very expensive for a small organization.
It’s not just the few hours they’ll be testifying, or giving deposition. A reasonable corporate representative is going to need to do quite a bit of prep work and review of relevant materials. So, that’s both a legal cost, and a productivity cost for whoever is collecting those documents and briefing the corporate representative.
“Just some hired legal representatives” hides quite a bit of cost.
Honest question: Why not do what most of the ass-clowns do when they get in front of congress - "I don't know, Senator. I have no recollection, Congresswoman. I plead the 5th, You Honor. No, we don't spy on Americans." etc.? Seems like no one ever actually faces any penalties for this.
Yep. It's easily going to be in the 5 digits.
you can call an attorney and pay an hourly fee usually between 100 - 400/hr to talk with an attorney about your case or pay a retainer fee for 10 hours... attorneys that throw out 5 digit numbers when asked for a price are rip offs
Right, but the suggestion wasn't "have a short consult with a lawyer". That's not cheap, but definitely won't break the bank for most small businesses.
The suggestion was "hire a legal representative" to be the corporate witness. I would assume that's a suggestion similar to the one in this article (https://www.agilelaw.com/blog/hiring-a-lawyer-to-be-your-30b...) about hiring a lawyer to be your 30(b)(6) deponent.
So, let's assume we hire a lawyer at $300/hour. Let's say they'll be a witness for 6 hours. But, they need to be carefully briefed and prepped on all the topics that they would need to be a witness for. Maybe that's 40 hours of work.
46*$300 = $13,800.
As the article on 30(b)(6) depositions notes: "So to do it right, the lawyer will need to be thoroughly prepped on the 30(b)(6) notice topics, which will certainly take time and cost the client money. No one said litigation is cheap."
I think most small-businesses would probably choose to use an internal employee to be their corporate representatives, especially in a matter such as this where they aren't directly involved in the litigation.
Often I've gotten the initial consultation/advice for free on how to do it yourself. The point of lawyer is protecting you when you are in danger, and in my experience they're happy to tell you that you don't need a lawyer here, and give some general tips on the process.
It’s definitely a heel move. I also fail to see how a small unprofitable firm (like most startups) is evidence of competition.
WhatsApp was a small unprofitable firm before they got bought for $18bn
Unprofitable, maybe.
> nor that they have an once of ethics
It still find it odd that people think large corporations actively engage in ethics in any other capacity than for PR and manipulating public opinion. I have never in my life seen anything other than the smallest of private companies make a decision based on "ethical" reasons where there was a competing financial reason. Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? I have witness several companies where bringing up ethical concerns about company behavior ultimately leads to termination.
The most obvious example of this non-ethical nature of corporations is record companies bringing up the "unethical" behavior of piracy. It's not like the heads of these companies had a big ethics meeting and decided "hey piracy is not ethical, we need to fight it!" or otherwise they would have also been like "and... next on the agenda is the unethical profiting of black musicians in the 50s and 60s, we should start cutting some checks now since that was clearly wrong."
Ethics is a social construction, created by participants in a society, as a way of organizing and regulating behavior. Ethics is subtle, flexible and perpetually evolving. We as a collective can develop and evolve our ethics overtime, but the essential part is that everyone is playing the same game.
Corporations are not playing the game at all, "ethics" from the view of a corporate entity is just another tool they can use to manipulate public opinion, but they don't participate in the ethics game.
The problem is that they participating in society in an asymmetric way. They want everyone else to adhere to an ethical system when interacting with them, but consider themself completely outside the realm of ethics.
When normal humans decide that they do not want to participate in the ethics game there are consequences ranging from mild chastisement to complete estrangement from society depending on the degree one individual refuses to participate in the ethical system of the larger society.
This is not to say corporations are evil, but that are absolutely amoral in that they are not participating the moral and ethical game. Bears are amoral in the same way. We don't expect bears to make ethical decisions, but when they habitually violate the ethical code of the humans they interact with, they are usually put down as a threat to society.
> Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons?
Yes, because I made them.
As a nation built on capitalism, it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility of the decisions made by those corporations. Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant to the fact that ethics certainly ought to be considered for any individual involved who believes themselves to be "acting ethically".
I've worked hard in my career to get a seat at the table where those decisions are made because I recognize that is a place where good can be done, at scale.
We should hold ourselves, and capitalism, to higher standards. And for those of us who are leaders, whether that is a small start-up or a major conglomerate, we are responsible for creating an environment where ethical decisions can be made.
>it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility
This is an interesting idea, and I agree that it would be great if it were true, but it’s not, and I don’t think it’s ever been. Those who make decisions for corporations don’t bear any burden; everyone else does.
Parent also conveniently states:
> Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant
This is actually a perfect example of the point I was making. "I want the benefits of participating in an ethical system but don't want the consequences".
This is why people claim that corporations behave like sociopaths.
A bear (from my example), isn't a sociopath, because it doesn't expect moral behavior from you, nor does it expect to benefit from moral behavior applied to it. A bear is perfectly amoral. A bear may cause you harm, and you may harm a bear, you might feel bad you had to kill a bear, but the bear will not be concerned either way with your ethical system, it simply wants to eat and live.
A sociopath on the other hand takes advantage of moral asymmetry, expecting you to treat it like a person when you interact with it (for example showing mercy for its trespasses), but wanting to be free to act like a bear in regards to serving its own ends.
I'm not against having Simula foot the bill in preparing whatever materials they may need to prepare to aid in the FCC's investigation - I think that's a reasonable cost of doing business, one that ought to scale with the size of the company, no? However, I agree that there may be valuable information you'd rather your competitor not have access to at your expense. Is there instances of, or analogues in other domains, of information relevant to the persecution of one party, belonging to another party, being reviewed in confidence by a third party? Or failing to find a fair solution in terms of that approach, how much can that information be trimmed?
This. I will never give money to Meta for anything.
It's easy. Never give money to Americans.
Americans? What did we do to you? (Besides the regime-change and proxy wars, and blowing up that pipeline - Sorry about all that.)
> I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google<
I giggled. When you go from "don't be evil" to this, you know you fucked up big time. This has to be the tagline of the decade in regards to Google ("Google!, the boss of Satan", hi hi hi).
Why?
Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free. World changing at it's time still helping people around the globe.
Their research blog is fantastic and shows what they value.
Google Io focus on people and security and trust.
Google is much further away from evil than plenty of other companies.
Did they kill stadia? Yes.
Did actually anyone care? No. Because stadia didn't matter anyway.
If you think Google's biggest sin is killing Stadia, you stopped paying attention over a decade ago.
I'm following well enough.
Have you checked the last Google Io?
They don't hide that they collect data.
Android is still open.
You can't expect Google to just give you a android distribution without their stuff for free just because.
You still can use it.
>They don't hide that they collect data.
They have a mode in Chrome called "incognito mode" that, to the average person, strongly implies it doesn't collect data, yet of course it does.
Citation needed.
It says what it does right there when you open it, and collecting data _and sending it to google_ would be pretty damn weird in incognito mode.
You're not invisible to websites, ISPs, ... and it says so right on the page.
> Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free.
I paid for the phone and they are still collecting my data. For me this is not free.
> I paid for the phone and they are still collecting my data.
You paid for the phone, not for the google services.
You're free to use non-google services on android. Moreover open street map, and numerous other email clients, exist - it's even a practical choice.
> For me this is not free.
No comment on this portion
You paid for a phone with Google.
That was your decision. There are other options.
And while you mind, billions are really happy to have a very secure and relativity cheap phone.
We've just gone from "they're not evil" to "okay so maybe they are evil but that was your choice, and they're cheap" in the span of a single comment.
Where?
I don't think Google is evil because they get money through ads.
I'm fine with that.
There is also a huge difference on how Google collects, stores and analysis your data vs. companies like Facebook.
I'm pretty sure Google actually knows we're your data is in comparison to Facebook
How can you determine it is cheap when Google is anticompetitively subsidizing the cost with advertising and data collection? You could be getting hosed and never know it.
Because android itself is free but I'm not seeing a lot of companies or you taking the time and effort to make an ad free Android phone for the same price or cheaper.
A competitor can’t enter the market to compete on price because Google subsidizes their product with ads. Thats the very picture of predatory, anticompetitive behavior. You can’t know what the market would be if Android were forced to compete fairly.
Microsoft did not leave the market because of googles ad revenue.
Apple is playing the game without ads as well.
Nokia could have forked android.
Google just continue to care enough.
The other companies could replicate it. The just don't mind
“Free”
They’re probably largely to blame for setting the precedent that Internet services should be free. And of course backed by selling user data or unsustainable venture capital backed business models.
Personally, I blame this wired article https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/
>> ‘free’
Don’t make us all laugh. It’s ‘free’ because the user is the product, not the service.
Why the f* would I need to clarify on hn that it's 'free' in sense of ad tracking?
We all know what it means. Still doesn't change the fact what the value for billion of people is real.
>Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free. World changing at it's time still helping people around the globe.
That's just the fat, juicy worm dangling on the hook just waiting for you to take it all in--hook, line, and sinker.
I use it without any issues and billions other do to.
I can decide if I'm okay with it or not. You are clearly not. I'm.
> Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free.
Not to belabor a frequently raised discussion topic, but "free" as in gratis is not the same as "zero dollars"
And google charges its customers
As modern capitalism goes, Meta is not on the low end of the scale WRT whatever we're calling ethical in a system that has legal penalties for leaving money on the table.
It's a ruthless, profit-drive, shareholder-owned, S&P 500-dominating company like all the rest, so you get all of that into the mix. It's not a particularly flattering group to be in if you're big into modern northern european social-good democracy.
But the idea that Meta is like, worse than the sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh that YC routinely connects founders with, or worse than Exxon, or worse than the pharma cartels, or? I could go on.
That's just silly now, come on.
I don’t really know the rules of evidence, but I don’t think this is coming directly from Meta, nor that they’re allowed to review these documents themselves. The subpoena has to come from the court, and so I imagine it’s the court reviewing the documents, not Meta. I sure hope that’s how it works. I’d love for a lawyer to chime in, though.
? It is literally coming from Meta. That's what the subpoena and court filings that are screenshotted on that page show. Meta sought the subpoena, the court granted it, and now Simula has to testify at a deposition where the questions will be asked by Meta.
And... it sort of has to work this way? It's not the job of the court to do Meta or FTC's advocacy for them.
Federal Courts don't usually grant a subpoena. Notably, the notice of third-party subpoeonas from this case wasn't even filed in the case.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64436614/federal-trade-...
Rather a lawyer that is admitted to the case uses his power as a representative to serve a subpoena. These are usually NOT reviewed by the judge or court first. The person receiving a subpoena can ask the court to quash the subpoena (basically void or modify the subpoena) if they believe the subpoena is inappropriate, unduly burdensome, or whatever else.
> quash the subpoena
Yes. Obviously they need a lawyer. But they should be able to get this quashed. At least narrowed and moved somewhere more convenient.
IANAL, but I would imagine that at the very least, Meta's lawyers would need to be able to see the documentation so that they can adequately prepare their argument/defense.
If this is actually how US's justice system works it is even more bonkers than I thought. Could someone versed in this legal system explain, please? Is is any accused that can demand documents/data/free research from vaguely related third parties, or only large companies? Enquiring minds want to know!
If one is accused of antitrust practices (as Meta is by the FTC), your defense is to show that there's actually competition. It's not that Meta that wants the documents for corporate espionage (or whatever), but that they want to prove that SimulaVR is competing just fine in the market that contains Meta. This is explained in the article, which many here clearly didn't read past the headline. This is roughly the same as subpoenaing someone as a witness; you don't really have a choice.
In fact, Meta themselves won't be looking at the documents; their lawyers, the FCC, and the rest of the court will. This is standard procedure, and no different from if SMALL_CORP sued BIG_CORP; BIG_CORP would still have to comply with subpoenas from SMALL_CORP.
Yeah, and we’re reacting to how crazy it is that Meta’s competitors are required to divulge internal documents to Meta so Meta can make a case that they aren’t anticompetitive.
> It's not that Meta that wants the documents for corporate espionage
Yes I’m sure we all trust Meta will behave ethically when given private information.
They're not required to divulge documents. They're required to respond to the subpoena. An acceptable response is that you don't want to divulge because they're confidential or the request is too burdensome.
Really? That’s not what OP from the linked article makes it sound like. I wonder if they got decent legal advice on the matter.
I believe the stance of the justice system is that Facebook's lawyers will behave ethically with the information because it's a professional obligation for lawyers.
You and I might see that as a laughable claim - unfortunately the justice system is run entirely by lawyers.
> You and I might see that as a laughable claim
Being disbarred is a very real threat to any lawyer putting a roof over their heads. Which is most lawyers.
So someone is sued for anticompetitive practices and that gives them alibi for looking directly into others' books, and they're just supposed to trust Meta will forget all the information afterwards?
IANAL, but AIUI in theory all major competitors get subpoenaed and then everything they say becomes part of the public record - so everyone sees everyone's cards laid out.
How exactly does that change anything? Meta is a 100000x larger company, they can do much more with that info than the others. And what about foreign competitors? What about not yet founded/stealth competitors? What about competitors only maybe planning to release a product (e.g. Apple)?
In the US legal system a non-government entity can force any 3rd party to spend time and money for their benefit? That seems pretty weird.
Yes, that's what a subpoena is. And it can be done in pretty much any legal system.
If you're on trial for murder, and your alibi is 'I was at work', you're going to need your boss to come in to testify on your behalf. If he doesn't feel like it, the court will compel him to show up and testify, on his time, and on his expense, under penalty of prejury.
This is a good thing.
If I was at work when the murder occurred, two or three discussions between police and my boss and coworkers would prevent a murder trial in the first place. Prosecutors don't like defendants with solid alibis.
Probably FTC has already done equivalent investigation, which calls the subpoena described in TFA further into question.
My understanding is that these kinds of enforcement actions have a much lower success rate than criminal cases, because large firms with legal departments are rarely squarely in the wrong. They are usually treading a grey line, and evidence like this can push the case one way or another.
A lawsuit between corporate firms is not really an "enforcement action".
What legal system doesn't have this feature? Seriously where are you from that this isn't how it works?
In Canada there’s “witness expense assistance” to help cover costs of travel and such.
It doesn’t fully address the abridgement of freedom caused by one’s civic duty to testify, and I’m sure the U.S. at least has a similar concept.
But by doing this, they are inadvertently showing that a company like SimulaVR cannot compete in this space, as the small team in charge of actually doing some work now has to devote its time to take care of this.
What happens if SimulaVR tells these lawyers to pound sand? I cannot imagine if I ran a small buisness and I was the victim of this how I would afford it.
You're found in contempt of court. If you disagree with the subpoena, you're allowed to file that with the court, and the judge will review it.
I suppose this is why it’s a bad idea to run any company from the USA. Being victimized by their corrupt legal system at your own expense… This sort of thing doesn’t happen when you run your company from behind Tor and use crypto for payment.
Most legal systems do this: if you're accused of doing X, and your claim that you weren't doing X hinges on evidence that can only be produced by other parties, you explain that to the court, and then the court can decide to compel those other parties to produce that evidence in the interest of a fair trial.
In this case, Meta is being accused of anti-competitive behaviour. Their claim is that there is plenty of competition and that if they are to be put on trial, then they should be able to present evidence that there is competition. The court agreed with that statement. Meta themselves cannot produce that evidence, because they are not privy to business goings-on at other companies, all they can see is other companies that are--in their opinion--competing in the same space. As such, Meta can only go "we consider the following companies our competition, their documents should make it ample clear that we are in competition" with enough of an additional explanation to justify each company listed. And then the court goes "very well, this is motivated enough to justify us compelling these companies to produce the evidence that you claim exists as part of discovery".
The only quirk here is the claim that a small company can't reasonably do what is being requested of them by the courts. And again: not by Meta, but by the courts. Meta doesn't get these documents, only Meta's legal team gets those documents, Meta employees don't get to see what's in the many boxes of discovery material that their legal team is going to receive. Not Bob from accounting, not Kelly from finance, and not Mark from the CEO team. Only the lawyers do.
Its still unethical. First off its not that big enough of a deal to warrant the financial obliteration of a small buisness via legal fees/airfare/hotels etc. Nobody died or has their life at stake here. Second off the company should be compensated for their expenses(lost buisness/airfare/legal fees). If this doesnt happen, then its clearly a court unjustly financially harming a small buisness. Thankfully we live in an era where its now possible to operate a company anonymously and not be beholden to unethical national legal systems operating at the behest of the ultra-wealthy.
You try to downplay the severity by saying "only Meta lawyers can see the contents" but that is still wrong. Whos to say these lawyers wont steal your trade secrets and use them to their own advantage? These people are still on Meta's payroll and nothing prevents Meta from asking its lawyers to divulge those secrets. To trust them not to is incredibly naive.
> You try to downplay the severity by saying "only Meta lawyers can see the contents" but that is still wrong. Whos to say these lawyers wont steal your trade secrets and use them to their own advantage?
They are ethically and legally bound not to. They can be disbarred, sanctioned, sued by SimulaVR, even thrown in prison. You're here ranting about the US court system, but you're wrong about a lot of it.
Lawyers, especially highly paid giant-tech-firm representing lawyers, tend to play by the rules when it comes to the actual court process itself. Could they pass all this confidential information on to Mark? Absolutely, trivially so even. Would it be a crime to do so? Absolutely also that. Are they going to risk their firm for a client? No lawyer playing at the level of Meta or Apple would be that stupid.
When it comes to lawyers, you get what you pay for, and Meta pays a lot for excellent lawyers who make sure they do everything by the book and follow the letter of the law where possible, and the spirit of the law where it can be defended if it needs to be, in order to get cases thrown out or settled before they make it to actual trial.
Most cases die in discovery, exactly because the lawyers (and only the lawyers) get to see everyone's cards, and get to say "look we can go to trial, but we've both seen all the documents, and it's plainly clear that one of us is right".
"But they can air all that dirty laundry during trial!" no, they can't, because unless that dirty laundry is necessary to demonstrate competition, which would be stupidly unlikely, you don't just get to reveal every document that your legal team has access to just because you feel like it. Doing so can get you removed from trial, sanctioned, or even disbarred, depending on how severe the impact of your misconduct is. The current issue is about discovery: you and your team (and NOT your client) get to find the information you need by sifting through thousands of documents.
Just because they “could be disbarred” or go to prison does for it also doesn’t mean they physically can’t or won’t do it. So I’m actually not wrong about anything I said here.
Yes, but in practice, this is just an opening offer in a negotiation. Parties will typically counter with something like: depose me in my home town for no more than x hours, and I'll produce what docs I have if you sign a protective order that makes produced info attorney's-eyes-only, i.e., business people cannot review. Unlikely a court would require more than this.
This is exactly how it would go down. People on this thread freaking out have no idea how the legal system works.
That negotiation still requires lawyers. Overall less legal expense assuming it succeeds, but we're still talking about a 5-figure legal bill at minimum, which for a small startup is a big hit. The employee distraction will probably double the cost at least, so it's reasonable to expect they'll lose 6 figures on this, which is equivalent to hiring another employee.
In-between Meta’s “to show that we have competition, we would like to show company Foo’s documents on X, Y and Z” and this subpoena is a judge who decides on whether those documents would help them reach a decision in this case, and whether it’s reasonable to ask Foo to do that work.
Also, the data you provide goes to the court, not (directly) to Meta.
I also think you can ask the court to keep (parts of) the data from the public record. That would require an argument as to why making it public would harm you.
It's not nearly as crazy as it sounds. If you were accused of murder and your alibi was you were at a bar, then the court could force the bar to produce any video footage they had, any records of transactions etc. If it was claimed that I was at said bar on said night, I could be forced to appear in court and produce any diary entries I had, any photos on my phone from that night. These are reasonable requests.
Meta is allowed to defend themselves against lawsuits. SimulaVR is a startup in the space. They have a shot in VR, or at least believe they do. SimulaVR a great example for Meta to use to defend themselves against a stupid lawsuit.
The FTC shouldn't be bringing this case. VR is still up for grabs. Defining the relevant market as the "dedicated fitness virtual reality app market" is questionable, and the idea it "proves the value of virtual reality" is nonsense.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/07/...
The idea that meta have some dominant position that can't be overcome is like suggesting Excite or Altavista had a dominant position in search that couldn't be overcome in the 90's, or MySpace in social in the early 00's. It's too early to call this market "won".
> VR is still up for grabs
Curious statement, considering the FTC is trying to preserve competition in the space. Excite and Altavista weren't trying to buy up the biggest websites around at the time.
Yes and they are overreaching in response to a perceived miss many years ago when FB bought Instagram. The VR market is so young and small that it doesn't need regulatory intervention. Let's allow it play out a little bit before we get regulators involved who think things like: this app is something which "proves the value of virtual reality to users".
And yeah, they were, and they were being bought and sold, and Yahoo too. There was lots of m&a action in the space. Virtually everyone involved went under despite having a dominant position for a hot minute.
From your link, the FTC says:
> "Meta already owns a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, and it had the capabilities to compete even more closely with Within’s popular Supernatural app. But Meta chose to buy market position instead of earning it on the merits."
I don't buy that VR is so young, we're a couple generations in now on multiple platforms. There are still new entrants in the space, which is good, and they would be negatively impacted if there were less established independent developers. Facebook had a head start, and they're trying their best to lock up the market before Apple/others enter it.
Best selling doesn't mean well selling. Someone is always the best selling in a market. It doesn't mean the market is anywhere at all.
VR might not even exist in 10 years. It's been hyped for 8-9 years now and user growth has been anaemic. Most headsets are shelfware.
Here is an article to read: https://mixed-news.com/en/quest-2-why-meta-isnt-talking-abou...
This isn't speculative nonsense - the usage problem is know across the industry.
Single digit millions of users is either early in the market or late... Either way no interference from a clueless regulator is required.
The Within deal is above $400 million. Doesn't seem like shelfware money.
The end of the article seems pretty consistent with FTC's view: Meta can compete with better hardware and software on it's own.
They do try to build better hardware and software. At this point they are throwing everything they have at it. The FTC are treating them as though it's a big, profitable, won market where Meta isn't playing fair. In reality it's a small, money losing, no winner market where Meta is trying to create something.
This is growth at all costs. Big companies buying up established independent developers to add to their services while consumers have less choice. AB/MS, Figma/Adobe, it needs to stop.
The VR market isn't in that phase. Adobe is in a big market with a strong position, makes a lot of money. That market has been around for decades. VR is default dead right now.
Can someone explain why is meta entitled to see a 3rd party's business plans, financials and statistics?
Though I'm not a lawyer, I believe defendants in court cases are entitled to command witnesses (signed off by a judge) to provide evidence that could be used in their defense.
It makes sense in the abstract: e.g. imagine you're accused of murder, and you know someone saw you somewhere else at the supposed time of the crime, yet they refuse to provide evidence to help you. It would seem reasonable they could compel you under that circumstance to testify.
Since the FTC has initiated a court case against Meta, I assume they are provided a similar legal right to command competitors to provide evidence that they haven't behaved "anti-competitively".
The question becomes whether, in this particular instance, they're abusing that privilege by demanding information they shouldn't be entitled to from unrelated/extraneous parties.
Heh, demand that the court provide you immunity from prosecution for being a monopoly, or refuse to testify on the fifth (because you obviously are a monopoly planning on buying Meta).
As you can see, also not a lawyer.
It's explained in the post. The FTC accused them of being anti-competitive. The only way to show you're not anti-competitive is to demand documents of your opponents that demonstrate you still have competition.
Then why not share to the FTC themselves and not META so that you can still keep it confidential from your competition?
Because FTC isn't the defendant. How would anyone share counter evidence to the plaintiff?
then how about a neutral third party?
In general it's a good idea to let the defendant decide how to argue their case and have access to evidence, for better and worse.
Seems like a "I'll know when I see it" situation. In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are and at least should be blocked from acquiring their competition.
Breaking them up or taking actual action against them would require deeper investigation with FTC taking the lead rather than potentially handing sensitive documents over to the offending company.
If the company wants to fight the block of acquisitions would foot the bill for everyone being supeonaed along with the FTC's expenses regardless of the case's success.
> In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are
Wait? What?
It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right. I mean, if I said, all people the police arrest are probably guilty and should go to jail, I would hope you'd disagree.
> It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right.
Big cases against big companies are different. Since the company will have (nearly) unlimited resources to fight, the FTC will only bring a case if they're pretty sure they can win, otherwise it will be a big waste of money all around.
It's really not anything like the police arresting people.
The government has lost many antitrust cases. In fact, they often do them for political reasons, not because they actually care about the outcome.
By the same logic: if FTC thinks net neutrality is bad, it probably is...
IANAL, so take this with some salt, but I don’t think Meta is directly requesting the documents, and Meta is probably never going to see them. I don’t think they get to request everything and pick through it to find a defense.
Subpoenas come from the court (which is how they’re able to be legally binding, i.e. you can be held liable—-in contempt—-for not complying), so my guess is that the court will review the various documents for evidence that Simula is or isn’t a competitor, so as to decide both whether they fit the bill as a competitor, and whether they’ll be needed during a trial. I imagine that the court can even decide that Simula does not provide evidence in either direction, so they’ll uninvolve Simula.
Documents have to be given to both sides or it's a pretty easy mistrial. It is likely nobody but Meta's lawyers will ever look at any of it, but they will look to try to build a defense.
And if something interesting WAS found, it would get out. And some of these things would become public record, either way.
Meta requested it, meta wrote the subpoena, and meta is the party who will receive the supplied documents.
You are confusing signed off by the court with issued by the court.
I don't begrudge them their annoyance (or click-through harvesting) but there is a straightforward legal process for objecting to and quashing a subpoena. Seems like it might apply here, at least in part: https://www.klgates.com/Litigation-Minute-Responding-to-Thir...
Also RE some speculation in this thread, it seems very unlikely to me that Meta's legal team was looking to get some free market research, but it is interesting to consider.
If you never been through discovery, it can seem that way, but nothing is straightforward or cheap about responding to a subpoena in a high profile case with a $500B company.
Samsung, Nintendo, and the other parties listed likely will spent $1-2m on these subpoenas. It likely involves thousands and thousands of messages and documents. A lot of back and forth with lawyers ("Each of these 12 employees exported everything with the word 'roadmap' in their email? what about Sandy's personal phone; I see a reference to an SMS elsewhere"), IP council to redact things, and then prep and support for the deposition.
SimulaVR is a tiny startup. It very well could kill them.
yeesh – one would hope that would fall under "undue burden or expense" but yeah I guess you never know how this kinda thing plays out until you've been through the ringer (like everything). Thinking again, I can't believe I included the descriptor "straightforward"
These types of things are incredibly silly. During the Epic vs Apple charade, Apple subpoenaed Steam for financial records as well which the judge forced Steam to comply with. The fact that a situation completely unrelated to me can force me to hand over what I would consider business secrets is a bit absurd.
Exposing those "business secrets" still has value, even to the general public. However, Apple should also have been forced to reveal their financial records.
What "business secrets" did Valve hide?
This blog post doesn't explain what they are actually going to do about this. It's just a (non-legal) complaint about the fact they got a subpoena, which is honestly a pretty normal and uncontroversial thing. It might be bad for Meta to request this info, but if so, the right thing to do is get a lawyer, submit a motion to quash, and then go after Meta for costs through legal process.
What is SimulaVR actually going to do to respond to this? Do they intend to respond? Who's representing them? I can't imagine a lawyer recommended writing this blog post.
The "we can't afford this" argument doesn't hold water. Lawyers are expensive but this is not a complicated thing SimulaVR is being asked to do, and they're likely to get their costs back from the court if they ask.
Well I am not a lawyer, and if I was a lawyer I wouldn't be a lawyer in that country, but my understanding is that SimularVR is under no obligation to create any new documents or gather any new information. So for example the answer to "Fine-grained usage statistics of our software" can legitimately be "we don't have any". If I was SimulaVR I would gather all documents that currently exist, and be very careful about creating any new documents regarding any of this before consulting with a lawyer. I imagine that creating new documents in answer to this might create further obligations, but I really don't know.
Of course I'm not a lawyer and don't really know what I'm talking about, and this is not legal advice.
Sounds like ~~Meta~~ Facebook is planning on moving into SimulaVR's turf and wants to know all the details for free and is abusing a legal process to get it.
Doesn't seem like a coincidence they are the only tiny headset subpeonaed while others are big (public) corporations.
I'm not a lawyer but: you can get all this stuff done in an hour. It's not an exercise in creating new material. You pull all the documents you already have on stuff like this, and anything you don't have you can say you don't have.
When you appear and are asked, give a short, high level but honest description of the industry - it's pretty simple really - "it's early stages, there are a number of players, Meta is the big dog as it currently stands."
> you can get all this stuff done in an hour
"I am not a developer, but adding multi tenancy to our product is as simple as adding a tenantid to every field in our database! Should only take a day or two"
Yeah, even if you're willing to defend your competitor you will still need to screen your documents to see which needs to be sealed and which documents that are under an NDA with an unrelated party that can be excluded. An hour is definitely too short for this, even if you have 100 lawyers (because the bottleneck is you and your knowledgeable employees and your lawyers won't likely to know the breadth of third-party secrets).
On the other hand, you won't be compensated (fully) after this. You may be able to recover your attorneys' fees in some cases but your transportation costs won't (it'll be only a token fee set by court).
They are a small startup.
They won't have hundreds of parties which they have documents under NDA and many NDAs have carve-outs for court orders anyway. All their docs are likely in Google Drive, Box or MSFT's thing, they can literally do it in an hour. If they try to do it in an hour it might take them 2.
Not quite the same....
There isn't a state licensing requirement to be a software developer. Any person off the street can start writing software tomorrow and call themselves a developer. There are a good number of jobs where someone needs to know a lot about the law, has taken courses or read a lot about it, makes decisions on legal matters on a day to day basis, but cannot call themselves a lawyer. A couple examples include anyone who works on mergers and acquisitions or distressed debt investing.
It's similar to "im not a financial advisor" or "this isn't financial advice". It can be from someone who knows an awful lot about the topic.
I think making assumptions about operating models, how easy something is or isn't to gather, etc. is inappropriate. In the same way a random 3rd party may make assumptions about you or your life based on these posts. They don't know you or anything about you.
Unless you have some unique insight into the situation, your assessment of the simplicity of dealing with this subpoena is not useful.
Obviously, SimulaVR feels differently or they wouldn't have written a blog post about it, wouldn't be in these comments, and we wouldn't be talking about it. And they'd know how onerous it is, given it affects them and they've said it is.
It's a forum, it's basically for speculation. Short of being rude, virtually nothing is "inappropriate". Saying something is "inappropriate" just suggests one doesn't have a reasonable response to the points made.
I've gone through it, from both sides. For a small company or individual, it's just not something to panic about or assume will consume an enormous amount of time. That isn't "unique" insight, lots of people go through this, the US is a litigious place. To be clear, they are not on trial.
Not exactly on top but in the SimulaVR video linked in the article there is a HN easter egg [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/x293SiEdv4M?t=55
Off topic but their product seems awesome - VR computers specifically designed for coding, including displaying small text, running Linux, etc. Beats working from a coding laptop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x293SiEdv4M&t=25s
It really is - and on the topic of "competition"..
Meta is not a competitor to Simula and honestly never will be because they will never give you Freedom to run Linux and hack to your heart's content.
But Simula is a competitor to Meta in that their existence gives people like me a serious (non-toy) VR headset they'd actually buy. So the reason Meta has competition from Simula is because they're terrible from a consumer-privacy and -respect perspective.
Quest runs Android and Android run on Linux.
That's only technically correct. I'd say given the words I said around "Linux," your response is pedantic at best.
Android is in no way what I want. And is it Open and Free? Can I do whatever I want with it? Can I install NixOS Mobile? Jailbreaking doesn't count since we are talking about official product offerings.
If I can't run my own software from source + make my device completely decoupled from Meta, it isn't a competitor of Simula to me.
https://developer.oculus.com/blog/unlocking-oculus-go/
So - their discontinued model?
So? Android is Linux only in the most technical sense, but not in the sense most people care about.
- you’re not free to switch distros like you can with conventional Linux hardware
- you cannot run a conventional Linux userland except for sad parodies of it that work out of a “chroot”
- X11 and Wayland support is limited
Android is diet Linux, not the real thing.
Reminds me of Immersed[1]. Which is an amazing concept but horrible on the Oculus. Literally makes me sick - and screen resolution/clarity leaves a lot to be desired if you're already at 4k/144hz.
I can't wait until someone cracks the code on this and makes it a reality.
1: https://medium.com/immersedteam/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d...
Yeah, Immersed popped up alongside us. A big reason of why we went the hardware route (as an originally pure software product) was that the existing hardware was not good enough.
Having worked with the prototype headset, I can fairly confidently say that at least the picture quality is now good enough (with our optical train/displays)
It's a bit tooting my own horn but when I first put on the prototype it was really satisfying. Incredibly crisp.
I’m surprised to see that Apple isn’t on the list of companies being subpoenaed. Maybe one advantage of not announcing your hotly rumored VR project until it’s done and available is that no one can subpoena you to ask about it.
The iPhone already has "AR" so yeah, I'm surprised they weren't on the list. If Meta could argue that Apple is a competitor, they'd've already won.
This seems a bit wild and super anti-competitive, of course it's hard to say with only hearing from simulaVR's perspective.
The content of information they're required to handover also seems incredibly sensitive, wouldn't that basically give Meta more 'Market Research' simply by reviewing these documents ?
It does seem a little bit like the corporate version of a 'Slap suite' also given how financially restricted Simula seem.
Meta’s defense on not being anti-competitive is to use the legal system to force all potential competitors to turn over incredibly sensitive information about their business & operations…
how is this even allowed under the law? Can Facebook really just demand this?
That's not really what's happening here. Meta can't just steal that info; it goes to Meta's lawyers, who will review it and decide what to do based on it. Meta itself won't get to see it, necessarily, unless the court lets them.
You might say "well, you can't trust lawyers" - but most attorneys actually take the security of processes like these extremely seriously, because they'll lose their jobs (and law licenses) if they don't.
But anyway, the right thing to do if SimulaVR doesn't want to reveal this info is to oppose the subpoena and try to get it quashed. Not write angry blog posts.
Are there rules preventing Meta from seeing the info? It seems like they would be allowed, themselves, to look at anything considered evidence in the case, barring an order from the judge to the contrary.
I believe what SimulaVR would do is petition the court to seal their responses and put conditions on who and how those responses can be viewed. Not an uncommon thing to do.
I do wonder if this blog post might be used by Meta in a way the authors didn't intend. Stating that they are not at all worried about competition from Meta is exactly what Meta needs to present as evidence.
Aside from that I'm not convinced SimulaVR shouldn't be worried. Regardless of whether Meta is targeting the productivity space intentionally (it is, I think) SimulaVR can very easily be a casualty of their dominance. For example I was interested in buying into SimulaVR but I probably won't if the Quest Pro is even close to good enough because along with that I get access to all the Oculus games etc.
I hope SimulaVR does crowdfounding the legal costs instead of folding to facebook. This is the first and yet only VR Product i am deeply interested in.
We're going to absorb the legal expenditures as part of our overall expenses, but you can crowdfund us by preordering a headset :)
From their post, it appears that Simula don't intend to comply with the subpoena. IANAL. Does receipt of these documents carry an obligation to provide the documents and deposition requested? Does this open them to later legal action if they refuse? It seems like a strange thing for a corporation to be able to demand that other companies hand over stuff like this, no matter the circumstance.
Just to clarify: we're seeking legal counsel and intend to comply with the law.
Many other larger companies have fought these subpoenas (Snap, etc) and, as far as we can tell, still had to hand over items.
Apologies, I apparently read too much into your statement about difficulty of hiring a legal defense and your "hope [that] they leave us alone." Good luck and I hope this doesn't take the wind out of your sails too much.
I know it's not helpful at this point, but you really should have had a relationship with a lawyer already. But now is the next best time. This is just the first time you're running into issues. As you grow, you're almost guaranteed to hit more. You'd also be smart to have a lawyer available to review all of your intellectual property, terms of service, privacy policies, etc.
I'm just a solo punter myself, but having my legal counsel already setup, knowing that I can call them at any time, rather than having to scramble to find someone in the moment a problem happens, gives me a lot of peace of mind.
Given how you're positioned as an Open Source company, maybe the Electronic Frontier Foundation can help you find someone good.
We already have standing legal counsel. George made it sound like we're just now seeking a lawyer, but we already reviewed our policies etc in the past.
If that's true, it sounds like companies have been weaponizing the legal system to get access to proprietary information from their competitors. Surely that has got to be illegal somehow?
The court decides whether a subpoena should be upheld or not. If the judge has signed off on this one, then it's all legit. Failing to comply would be contempt of court.
I'll never understand how US court system basically allow you to randomly force anyone unrelated to a case into it and suffer the legal cost. It make it so easy to weaponize any case to your advantage.
What if a ruling requires information held by someone else? Should the case just be dismissed because of lack of evidence? Having a functional justice system is probably worth some snags.
The legal cost aspect is unfortunate. However, as others have mentioned, the court probably doesn't require the assembly of new documents, but rather submission of existing ones. So while there is a cost, it's not devastating.
The interesting question is whether or not this specific subpoena has real merit, or if the court was played by Meta.
Like many things in the world, it all only works because the vast majority of people aren't assholes.
As it gets more and more weaponized the slow arm of the law will move to prevent it.
Time to get well-versed in malicious compliance.
Malicious compliance is a good way to get thrown in contempt. Courts aren't stupid.
A game in which a small startup can only choose among different bad endings
A subpoena is a court order (and the service requirement constitutes legal proof that it was delivered). Refusal to comply is contempt, which can be punished as a crime. No, you don't get to ignore a subpoena.
In this particular case it looks like they're just being asked to testify about their product in an unrelated case. They aren't being sued.
Call your lawyer first and do what they say. Most likely you can arrange a deposition more convenient to your schedule and location.
Just want to clarify: we're not ignoring this subpoena and intend to comply with the law. We're in contact with a lawyer and are discussing our options with them.
Who pays for all the costs associated with this? Can you abuse the legal system to drive a company into bankruptcy by repeatedly subpoenaing them?
There are anti-SLAPP laws but those are for more for protecting freedom of speech:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
but you can be labeled a "vexatious litigant" which causes you to be radioactive for representation (nobody wants to disbarred):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation
(IANAL but I enjoy watching them on TV)
From what I understand vexatious litigant is a really, really high bar to cross, and any remotely competent lawyer should be able to prevent you from crossing it.
People are really (really) misinterpreting this. The OP isn't being sued, they aren't being attacked as a competitor to Meta. (In fact the obvious guess here was that they're being asked to testify in this antitrust case to the fact that their product is successful!)
A subpoena is just a demand for testimony. The court wants to "know what you know" so it can make a better decision. Testimony before courts of law is part of your civic duty as an inhabitant of a nation under the rule of law. Yes, it has costs. You have to bear them for the same reason you need to pay your taxes, because a civilization without courts isn't one we want to live in.
> People are really (really) misinterpreting this. The OP isn't being sued, they aren't being attacked as a competitor to Meta.
The only way to misunderstand this is to not have read the linked page. HN is not immune from headline-only outrage. The first paragraph literally ends with:
> ... in relation to the government's recent injunction against their acquisition of a VR fitness company.
Costs don't have anything to do with being sued or not. A subpoena to a person is relatively easy to respond to (unless you need a lawyer to help you negotiate the fifth amendment for reasons), but this will cost time and money, both things that we all know startups have in vast quantities.
If the answer is not Meta pays, then why isn't it?
I told you: The recipient pays as part of their civic duty. If you want protection under the law for your own grievances, you need to be prepared to assist the court in the adjudication of the grievances of others.
And the practical reason is that poor people have the right to petition courts for redress of grievances too. You're upset because Zuckerberg happens to be rich, so this seems unfair. But what if the startup had to sue someone and needed testimony from someone else to prove their case? You think they should have to pay just to get facts before the court?
At some point, yes, otherwise it can and will be abused, just like patent lawsuits already are.
There are cases of this already happening in the case of poor people, otherwise vexatious litigants wouldn't exist.
I wonder if the judge even knew that one of the list of companies was "small company mctinypants" or just assumed all were massive and huge.
Once more: it's just a subpoena. OP is looking at a few thousand dollars of legal fees and maybe a trip to wherever the court is. If you're operating a profit-seeking company in a legal regime that provides the protection that ours does, you simply have to be able to bear those costs. If your VC's or angels won't pay it, they aren't serious investors.
The subpoena is issued by a judge for a pending case, you can either fight it by submitting an opposing motion or be held in contempt of court which in this case is pretty much a loss.
Nowhere does it say that they don't intend to comply.
I get the arguments that Meta is forced to defend it's claim it's not being anticompetitive, but isn't part of a small business like SimulaVR's sole competitive advantage being secretive with it's plans because it doesn't have to publicly state everything it's doing?
Wouldn't this take that away from them? Is it not a simple enough point to object to the subpoena on?
As someone who is not a lawyer, my question is what are the potential response avenues to a subpoena like this. That is, Meta has essentially demanded a ton of work from SimulaVR, for free. I very much agree with Simula's response of "We can't afford stuff like this".
So, realistically, what are Simula's options? I imagine a "fuck off" response won't go over well with the court. Can they give some cursory information? Is there some way they can challenge the subpoena as overly burdensome?
I hate how our legal system makes it so easy to demand work from someone else, when the burden on the demanding party is so extremely low. Why shouldn't Meta need to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for the information they are requesting? The lawyers are definitely charging that much.
This kind of subpoena is boilerplate. No one actually expects SimulaVR to provide all this information or to show up for a deposition.
This is actually how it will go down:
SimulaVR-Lawyer: Hey Meta-lawyer, I got your subpoena. We're a tiny company and this is overbroad. What do you guys actually want?
Meta-lawyer: Totally understand. Can we get a declaration from your founder about what your company is trying to do, who their competitors are, and few info about your financials? If you have pitch decks for investors, we'd love to get that as well.
SimulaVR-Lawyer: That seems doable but can the financials be filed under seal and attorney-eyes-only?
Meta-lawyer: Yeah that makes sense.
SimulaVR-Lawyer: Lemme talk to the founders and follow up with you. Let's talk later about what the declaration will look like.
Meta-lawyer: Thank you - appreciate it, and looking forward to hearing back soon.
Not a lawyer or involved in the legal system, but is this a situation where you can respond with your rates for providing this expert witness service? If so, this may be a situation where you can charge them $500/hr plus costs (eg atty) for the service of extracting, redacting and summarizing some of the information they've requested.
Edit: your attorney may have a better idea of what rates for this might be, but I'd suggest looking into what it costs to have a known and respected third party physician do chart review and testify in court in malpractice cases, then consider what they'd charge if they were also expected to anonymize and show information from their own practice and patient charts.
You need to get a lawyer.
I am not a lawyer, but I annoy them daily.
You can decide not to appear, but you can be held in contempt. Note that your subpoena comes from the court, not Meta.
You need to get the lawyer to negotiate down what to provide. The first salvo is always everything, including the kitchen sink.
You need a lawyer to know to whom to talk to. You need to get the lawyer to negotiate the expenses associated with this.
Read Rule 45 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_45) much of what you describe (distance, financial burden) are addressed there.
Did I mention, you need a lawyer?
rule 45 allows attorneys of record in a case to issue subpoenas without leave of the court, I think
subpoena may not 'come from the court'
per this https://media.goldbergsegalla.com/uploads/sll-mpl_forthedefe...
(but this doesn't change your point about risk of contempt + it being a good idea to respond)
First thing we did was get a lawyer.
And they suggested that you write a blog post?
We ran it past them and they ok'd it. We as a company are fundamentally very open. It is quite literally a core facet of our business, and that includes not just the technical parts.
Of course there's stuff that's internal, but something that's literally a matter of public record isn't it.
Thank you. It did not come across in your blog post.
May your lawyer be cheap, vicious, despicable, and never-losing.
Times are getting tough generating revenue from customers.
One annoying thing about Facebook is that they already have zero goodwill among anybody who pays attention to this kind of stuff, so it isn't like these kind of shenanigans will really hurt their reputation.
SimulaVR should try to explain to the courts how the subpoena itself is having an anticompetitive effect.
Frankly there is nothing worse than seeing a legal notice. At best it means thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and added stress/lost time. At worst its the end of a company.
I know this story won’t make headline news but boy, Meta sure seem to be going out of their way to shred every last bit of goodwill they have with, well, everyone?
If I were simulaVR, I would make this very painful to meta.
You would put together business plans that literally say no other vendor can compete against meta. Basically confirm the anti-competition. That even that subpeona is anticompetive and an attempt to further crush them.
Malicious compliance the entire way.
I think the subpoena is mostly for existing records and novel records of existing plans. IANAL, but I think if you were to create novel documents that were most certainly less than honest for the purpose of swaying the case, there could be legal consequences for you.
Courts aren't stupid - if it becomes apparent that you are attempting to maliciously comply, they can still get you based on your apparent intent.
Obviously playing with very hot fire.
Simula has to have a business plan. Has to list their competitors like HTC and Meta who are anticompetitively working together on a virtual world. viveverse is literally called metaverse; technically i don't know if it's literally the same virtual world.
You can then look at Lenovo, Microsoft, Valve and Google whose VR stuff died. Your assumption is they cant compete against them.
Then you explain your business plan of finding a wierd open source niche. Entirely because competing against meta is impossible.
I'm not saying fabricating evidence or like try to get your accounts banned off facebook to make it look like they are trying to crush you. You simply make the reasonable argument and business case a unresourced startup can't compete against a 350billion $ org with an army of devs.
Meta's fault for bothering you. Then again you're literally holding a paper vial of anthrax on this one if you do it. #YOLO
Yeah, don't go creating bullshit in response, but anyone who is remotely connected to anything Meta, Google, Apple are involved in should have in their documents details on why they won't be competing with the big names.
Judges HATE malicious compliance.
Best case is Simula can file an injunction along the lines of not being a competitor or not having any relevance and wishing to keep their trade secrets...secret.
Otherwise, comply with only existing documentation. For example, if they requested fine-grained details on metrics that don't exist, then the correct response to that is "doesn't exist".
Isn't that what they already did with this statement? Quoting last paragraph subtitle "We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta" is exactly that. Therefore the FTC can take that and prove FB is a monopoly, or whatever FTC end-game is.
That sounds like a bold faced lie to me. To quote the article:
>Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and laptops. So our real competition is laptops & PCs, not other gaming headsets.
Everything Meta has been releasing publicly about their VR Headset plans make it blatantly clear that it is not only targeting gaming.
How about a look at Meta's app sales to prove that? I think this list of who the subpoena was served to is pretty hilarious, and it's even more hilarious that Apple's not on this list:
Alphabet Inc.
ByteDance Inc.
HTC America, Inc.
Huawei Technologies USA, Inc.
Nintendo of America Inc.
Panasonic Corporation of North America
Samsung Electronics America, Inc.
Simula VR, LLC
I think the malicious intent is all on Meta's side. They have a head start with Occulus, no one else is even close in the US.
In what way is the subpoena hilarious? All of those companies to my knowledge are players in the VR space with hardware.
Google has Daydream, and working on more
Bytedance has the Pico's
HTC has the Vive
Huawei has one as well, don't remember it right now
Nintendo has something similar to daydream but for the Switch
Panasonic has the MeganeX
Samsung has the Gear
Simula have their headset
They all sell some form of headset hardware.
It's hilarious because of Simula's size compared to the rest, and because it doesn't include Apple/Valve, and really, only those two should even be on the list at all! They literally subpoenaed everyone except their real potential competition. I get it, they subpoenaed whoever they could. I think the FTC in the Bloomberg story linked in the post said it best: "It reflects their scorched-earth defense strategy here to fight in whatever manner is available to them"
There isn't anyone with a current model headset like the Quest, that is even remotely close in market share in the US.
That's what prompted my idea. Though as the other comments said, playing with fire.
Never forget, the company is called Facebook. The Meta rebrand was a desperate ploy to sidestep negative attention surrounding ongoing litigation and to bolster hope in the dying company as they try to pivot toward VR.
The problem here is the FTC trying to regulate a nascent industry by fiat. The startup is caught up in the silliness of trying to define competition in an area of trade that doesn’t really exist yet. Exactly when the FTC should go find something better to do, like health claims in supplements.
> Exactly when the FTC should go find something better to do, like health claims in supplements.
That's FDA.
Just stumbled upon this article about Meta getting a 3rd party Instagram client removed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33108032
Wondering if it’s just a coincidence that Meta is taking all these measures now.
Couldn't SimulaVR request all the same documents from Meta in response? Or is it a one-way process?
I'm sure Meta's legal team would find reasons why they wouldn't have to be responsive or other ways narrow the scope. SimulaVR in turn could use the same arguments against Meta.
simulavr isn't a party to the suit, their powers here are going to be more limited
https://simulavr.com/blog/software-overview/ VR, Godot, Haskell, Wayland – these people are having too much fun, must be karma
Ordered a founders edition many months ago. I hope to use it one day and add it to my nixos config. If not it'll help the open source community. One thing is certain, the VR/AR I want to use won't come from big tech.
SimulaVR should see this as a massive endorsement and indicate they are the one company that threatens the behemoth and are open for investors.
In fact they should consider changing their motto to "Injunctioned by Meta"
ianal but if I were drafting simula's motion to quash, I would mention that the categories of information fb wants are confidential or trade secrets under most employment agreements, including probably fb's
and that rule 45 requires the court to quash if the subpoena is for 'privileged or other protected matter'
and if you can prove undue burden you can sanction their firm (in theory at least)
(could also just refresh the northern district's efile until big G responds, then steal theirs)
Could this subpoena be used by SimulaVR as evidence of behaving anticompetitively by sucking away resources for legal proceedings?
I will never understand the US legal system. How is this even allowed? This is IP pilfering through a sham lawsuit and the courts.
Can't wait for armchair lawyers making wild accusations on things they don't understand in these comments
The interesting takeaway is that even if you don't consider SimulaVR a competitor of Meta, Meta does O_O
This is exactly the type of thing that made me lose All faith in the US Justice System and consider defecting.
What, why? This is normal legal process. I hate Meta plenty, check my comment history, but this isn't an unusual or corrupt thing.
Being forced to divulge your trade secrets to a competitor company’s legal team + cover the cost of travel to court in a far away state + denial of income- under circumstances in which you’ve done nothing wrong -might be “normal legal process” but it’s highly unethical in my opinion. Just one of many ways in which a small business in USA can get wreaked by the legal system over the most frivolous of things.
Someone fix the grammar on that last statement!
"We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta"
Oh look it’s another episode of “USG and bigco collaborate for cartoon-villain style antics.”
What if you just give them a very loose summary and see. Do the minimum first
The irony of an antitrust lawsuit hurting smaller competitors.
man, hacker news is just not what it used to be.
TIL how a subpoena can work. I had no idea.
Who pays the legal fees in this case?
From what I'm gathering it's on SimulaVR to respond to the subpoena, but there's nothing preventing them from having their solicitor contact Meta's and arrange for payment to cover costs.
That commercial is hilarious. Everybody is clearly mocking this dipshit for wearing a VR headset in public.
I’d tell FB where to go.
As Facebook slowly dies we will see more and more thrashing from the monster.