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- From: Mark Zuckerberg
- Date: June 22, 2015 10:54 AM
- Subject: VR / AR strategy and One
- With our recent discussions about accelerating our work in VR / AR, I thought it would be
- useful to articulate what goals I hope we accomplish with our investment.
- Our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about
- 10 years. It can be even more ubiquitous than mobile – especially once we reach AR –
- since you can always have it on. It’s more natural than mobile since it uses our normal
- human visual and gestural systems. It can even be more economical, because once you
- have a good VR / AR system, you no longer need to buy phones or TV’s or many other
- physical objects – they can just become apps in a digital store.
- Beyond the sheer value we can deliver to humanity by accelerating and shaping the
- development of this technology, we have three primary business goals: strategic, brand
- and financial.
- The strategic goal is clearest. We are vulnerable on mobile to Google and Apple because
- they make major mobile platforms. We would like a stronger strategic position in the next
- wave of computing. We can achieve this only by building both a major platform as well as
- key apps.
- I will discuss the main elements of the platform and key apps further below, but for now
- keep in mind that we need to succeed in building both a major platform and key apps to
- improve our strategic position on the next platform. If we only build key apps but not the
- platform, we will remain in our current position. If we only build the platform but not the
- key apps, we may be in a worse position. We need to build both.
- From a timing perspective, we are better off the sooner the next platform becomes
- ubiquitous and the shorter the time we exist in a primarily mobile world dominated by
- Google and Apple. The shorter this time, the less our community is vulnerable to the
- actions of others. Therefore, our goal is not only to win in VR / AR, but also to accelerate
- its arrival. This is part of my rationale for acquiring companies and increasing investment
- in them sooner rather than waiting until later to derisk them further. By accelerating this
- space, we are derisking our vulnerability on mobile.
- The brand goal is also simple. The weakest element of our brand is innovation, which is a
- vulnerable position for us as a technology company dependent on recruiting the best
- engineers to build the future. Having an innovative brand will pay dividends not only in
- recruiting but therefore across all of our products and other efforts as well.
- An innovative brand comes from building tangible new products. Our work in VR / AR is
- the best example we have. Our core social networking work is no longer new,
- Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and AI is not yet tangible. We
- can do more to tell our story in each of these areas, but succeeding in VR / AR has the
- most innovation potential in the next 5-10 years. Of course we need to succeed in VR /
- AR to gain any of these brand benefits, but if we do, this will be very valuable.
- The financial goal is the most specific and this is where I’ll discuss which aspects of the
- VR / AR ecosystem we want to open up and which aspects we expect to profit from.
- I think you can divide the ecosystem into three major parts: apps / experiences, platform
- services and hardware / systems. In my vision of ubiquitous VR / AR, these are listed in
- order of importance (although it’s worth noting that Apple has built the world’s most
- valuable company with a high-end vision by reversing that order).
- The key apps are what you’d expect: social communication and media consumption,
- especially immersive video. Gaming is critical but is more hits driven and ephemeral, so
- owning the key games seems less important than simply making sure they exist on our
- platform. I expect everyone will use social communication and media consumption tools,
- and that we’ll build a large business if we are successful in these spaces. We will need a
- large investment and dedicated strategy to build the best services in these spaces. For
- now though, I’ll just assert that building social services is our core competence, so I’ll
- save elaborating further on that for another day.
- The platform vision is around key services that many apps use: identity, content and
- avatar marketplace, app distribution store, ads, payments and other social functionality.
- These services share the common properties of network effects, scarcity and therefore
- monetization potential. The more developers who use our content marketplace or app
- store or payments system, the better they become and the more effectively we can make
- money.
- It’s worth noting a few things. First, these platform services should be cross platform.
- Most of the services can be offered on iOS, Android, on desktop, etc. On Android, we can
- bother offer an app store and offer many of these services to apps distributed through
- Play – if we app switch to our preloaded marketplace for purchases, we won’t even have
- to pay Google’s 30% rev share. Second, this platform definition is not actually an OS in
- the technical sense. In modern OSes, however, most of the value comes from
- advantaging the OS provider’s own platform services on the devices where its OS is
- installed. I think our primary platform strategy should not be focusing on building a fully
- independent OS, but owning these core platform services across all systems. This will be
- challenging as OS providers will try to push us out, but if we build superior services and
- provide things OSes need (eg Unity support), then we have a good shot at success.
- The last part of the ecosystem is hardware / systems. This category includes all of the
- core technology required to make VR / AR work but that has little sustainable business
- value independently: the headsets, controllers, vision tracking, low-level linux and
- graphics APIs. These pieces all need to be very good for the overall ecosystem to be
- viable. For example, smartphones needed good touch screens, battery management,
- radio technology, etc. But aside from brand, patent enforcement and building teams that
- are consistently far ahead of everyone else, this is the most difficult part of the ecosystem
- to build into a large business. Even when companies do succeed, no single hardware
- company gains ubiquity like our vision requires us to do with apps.
- Developing hardware and low-level systems is very important for a few reasons. It helps
- us accelerate and influence the development of VR / AR. It gives us a significant
- opportunity to integer our platform services across all systems (not just ours). And if we
- do consistently great work, it could potentially become an important revenue driver like it
- has for Apple.
- Our overall vision for the space is that we will be completely ubiquitous in killer apps,
- have very strong coverage in platform services (like Google has with Android) and will be
- strong enough in hardware and systems to at a minimum support our platform services
- goals, and at best be a business itself.
- In order to achieve this vision, there are many different investments we’ll need to make.
- In key apps, we have no social app effort yet and our video effort is weak. We’re going to
- need to jumpstart both. In platform services, we’ve started building an identity, app store
- and payments with Oculus, but we’re years behind Valve and Google, and we haven’t
- even started on the avatar and content marketplace. In hardware and systems, we are
- leading in headsets, controllers and low level SDK for VR, but we don’t have a real
- development / graphics system and we’re far behind on AR.
- Over the next few years, we’re going to need to make major new investments in apps,
- platform services, development / graphics and AR. Some of these will be acquisitions and
- some can be built in house. If we try to build them all in house from scratch, then we risk
- that several will take too long or fail and put our overall strategy at serious risk. To derisk
- this, we should acquire some of these pieces from leading companies.
- Given our own strengths, we will probably be best served building most apps and
- platform services internally while using acquisitions opportunistically, and then acquiring
- most of the core VR / AR and 3D tech where we have little experience. This is why I am
- supportive of acquiring Unity, expecting we will acquire an AR company in the next few
- years and opportunistically acquiring VR app teams, while also consistently encouraging
- us to ramp up our internal investment on our platform services ourselves.
- One important question is that if our strategy is to win key apps and platform services,
- then why do we need to make such a big investment in hardware and systems? This is
- an especially important question when we’re considering investing billions of dollars into
- Unity over the next decade. To illustrate the value of owning this core technology, I’ll
- outline the advantages of owning Unity.
- First, Unity will help us build world class VR / AR experiences required to deliver on this
- overall mission…
- Over time someone will need to tightly integrate al of the software and hardware
- components of this ecosystem – headset, controllers and tracking on the hardware side;
- avatars, content and identity on the software side – and Unity is at the right level of the
- stack to do this for most developers.
- If we own Unity, we can ensure this always happens well, happens quickly and happens
- with our systems. If we do this integration with Unity, the Unreal and others will prioritize
- delivering great experiences with us as well and we will push the entire market forward. If
- we don’t own Unity, then at best we can incentivize them to prioritize doing this for us and
- everything will just move more slowly, but at worst someone may acquire them and block
- this from happening at all or with us.
- At some level, it’s important to own the core technology you depend on to achieve your
- mission. Even if there is potentially a path forward with it, owning it increases integration
- opportunities and decreases risk.
- Second, Unity will increase the adoption of key platform services like avatar / content
- marketplace and app distribution store. We will achieve this be integrating these services
- with Unity to make them both superior and easier to use.
- As an example of superiority, if we want to make sure our avatars or identity systems
- work really well in Unity, well easily be able to do that. No one else building a competing
- avatar system will be able to modify the Unity engine that everyone uses to support their
- services in a first class way. We will continue Unity’s promise of supporting every
- development environment, but there will undoubtedly be efficiencies in owning Unity that
- will help us be the best in building key services.
- As an example of ease of use, because we own Unity, our key services will always work
- well and work fast. We can also make our key services the defaults that developers use.
- We can make it so compiling from Unity is directly compatible with and ships to our app
- store, and so the default avatars and content are using our marketplace format. This
- does not guarantee our services succeed if they’re not great, but if they are great then it
- guarantees all developers will have easy access to them.
- Further, since our key services will be integrated so well and so prominently into Unity,
- that will put pressure on other engines like Unreal to do close integrations with our key
- services as well as to make sure their developers have the same access. This will help
- achieve our goal of spreading the important platform services – even to platforms we
- don’t control.
- Increasing our developer surface area will give us more opportunities to integrate and
- upsell our key platform services over time. Just like developers who deeply rely on
- Google’s Play Services are more likely to use the next Play Service API that comes out,
- developers who use more of our systems to build their VR / AR experiences will also be
- likely to use additional services as we build them as well.
- Third, Unity increases our ability to ensure other platform companies support our platform
- services.
- If we own Unity, then Android, Windows and iOS will all need us to support them on
- larger portions of their ecosystems won’t work. While we wouldn’t reject them outright, we
- will have options for how deeply we support them.
- For open platforms like Android and Windows, this helps level the playing field and helps
- to ensure we can continue offering our app stores and other key services. For iOS, this
- will not influence Apple to let us offer an app store, but it could give us other important
- bargaining chips as part of our VR / AR strategy or otherwise.
- On the flip side, if someone else buys Unity or the leader in any core technology
- component of this new ecosystem, we risk being taken out of the market completely if
- that acquirer is hostile and decides not to support us. Again, this likely wouldn’t be a
- sudden proclamation that Unity no longer supports Oculus, but Google or someone else
- would just never prioritize improving our integrations.
- To some degree, this downside is such a vulnerability that it is likely worth the cost just to
- mitigate this risk, even if this deal didn’t come with all of the upsides for which we
- originally contemplated it.
- Going back to the question of whether it is worth investing billions of dollars into Unity
- and other core technology over the next decade, the most difficult aspect to evaluate is
- that we cannot definitively say that if we do X, we will succeed. There are many major
- pieces of this ecosystem to assemble and many different ways we could be hobbled. All
- we know is that this improves our chances to build something great.
- Given the overall opportunity of strengthening our position in the next major wave of
- computing, I think it’s a clear call to do everything we can to increase our chances. A few
- billion dollars is expensive, but we can afford it. We’ve built our business so we can build
- even greater things for the world, and this is one of the greatest things I can imagine us
- building for the future…
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