What are the reasons why 3D TVs and theaters failed, and do they apply to VR too?
Searches for Oculus over the last 5 years. The increase is slow, but it's real, and it wouldn't be the first consumer product to have a slow start before becoming a huge success. The iPod took 4 years before really taking off.
That said, I still don't understand the case for VR for anything else than video games — and even then. VR vs PC / console / mobile:
A. A lot more immersive — but then 3D TVs were too
B. 3D controls — but then so was the Wiimote. People don't like having to move around (cont'd)
C. Your neck is an input device
D. Pixel density too low to display text (clear roadmap to fix)
E. Nausea inducing for a lot of use cases (no clear roadmap to fix?)
F. Significantly less convenient to set up, and "convenience always wins"
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1/ I'm insanely excited to announce what I've been working on for the last year:
Teamflow, a virtual office that makes you feel like a team again. Coming out of stealth and announcing our $3.9M seed round today 🎉🎉🎉 teamflowhq.com/blog/announcin…
2/ @getTeamflow lets you see your video in an office where your team can hang out.
You can move yourself around, and only hear and see people around you.
So when you want to chat with someone, you can just drag yourself over and say hi — no more juggling with Zoom links
3/ You can also open apps in the space, like Figma, Trello or Google Docs.
Everybody can see and use them together — so you can meet around your sprint board in the morning for standup.
I think this is one big reason why Uber won. For ~half of what HQ built, the user was ops, not riders. We built a ton of general purpose tools that they used to hustle and run their business — and how they used these tools often surprised even us
The most spectacular example of this is Uber Eats — originally a pilot called Uber Fresh in LA, which required 0 product or engineering work to launch. It was all ops techcrunch.com/2014/08/26/ube…
The vast majority of products we ended up building at HQ started as ops-only experiments — you’d always hear people say things like “the [DC] team is killing it with [experiment X], we need to productize this.”
It's funny how first time entrepreneurs worry about giant cos entering their market, and anybody who's worked at a giant co tells them not to worry (cont)
The way I think of it now is: you never compete against Google. You compete against a PM at Google, who works 9-5 (sorry!), doesn't care 1/100th as much as you do, and has 70 lawyers on his back and 6 months of meetings every time he wants to do something
Big cos sometimes do kill startups — but it's the exception not the rule.
Look at Spotify. 3 of the biggest companies in the world compete with them — Apple, Google and Amazon.
Or Slack — Google, Microsoft, FB all compete.
Or Dropbox — Apple, Google and Microsoft.
All do fine.
A thread of beliefs I’ve always thought were obvious and important, but have found out over the last few years were a lot less widely held than I thought 1/ progress benefitting everyone is possible and desirable (like I said, obvious, and shocking that so many people disagree)
2/ the most important and almost only kind of progress is technological. Social progress depends on technological progress.
3/ GDP and productivity growth are not exact measures of progress, but they’re excellent proxies for it. One should obsess over every 0.1% of growth — over the long term, it makes the difference between the dark ages and a sci fi utopia
1/ My most important learning since I switched to product management is the importance of all the "touchy feely" leadership stuff. I initially thought PM competence was about organization skills, and tech, design, and data savviness.
2/ But now I realize all those matter less than optimism, energy, the ability to inspire a team, make it gel, and build a culture of trust and accountability. Product management is as close to sales as it is to engineering — it's your job to always be super pumped
3/ Tactically, this means:
- Having frequent team lunches, outside the office. No group of humans can bond that doesn't eat together.
- Be authentic. Don't hide behind a bs corporate mask. Allow fun and silliness into work.
- Be genuinely concerned about your teammates' wellbeing
@KevinSimler 1/ This is so good. One thought: not all networks are neutral, and one can design a network such that its edges are selectively conducive to a certain type of idea only.
@KevinSimler 2/ And it often takes a ton of tiny design decisions ("a thousand lead bullets") to nudge the transmission rate of the kind of idea you want above its critical threshold.
@KevinSimler 3/ Fascinated by the kind of decisions networks like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia made to maximize the spreading of truth and minimize that of idle chatter and dogma.