Xiao Za's metaverse started unfavorably. Less than a week after the time came to 2022, the news of "self-developed operating system being frustrated" came out. But three hours later, Meta categorically denied the news.
The importance of the operating system can also be seen in the speed of this meta clarification. Self-developed operating systems in the metaverse and established an "ecological high wall" is the goal that Xiao Za has been thinking about for many years.
Although the facts are clear, but the focus is on the operating system, the crowd looks at the meta, and the confidence in its future development may have to be discounted.
A
First of all, the news exposed this time, at 10 p.m. Beijing time on January 5, a media called The Information (hereinafter referred to as the information network) published an article saying that "Meta terminated the VR & AR operating system project".
At least some of the projects in the operating system business have been shelved, such as XROS. As early as 2019, the information network dug out that Meta (then called Facebook) had commissioned Microsoft co-developer Mark Lukovsky to build its own operating system for its XR ecosystem from scratch.
Zuckerberg himself personally confirmed in the same year that Facebook was building a microkernel operating system in the direction of VR. The configuration file of its title device has also been captured by the media many times with the presence of XROS code.
However, according to the information network report, last October, the core figure Mark Lukovsky left Meta to join Google. It was after Lukovsky left that the project came to a standstill. Employees were notified by email in November to stop the XROS project, which was more than 300 people involved.
The setback of the self-developed operating system means that Meta will continue to rely on Google in the dream of the metaverse. Currently, Meta uses an open-source version of Google's Android operating system to power the existing Oculus Quest VR device.
Snakes beating seven inches, killing people, and thwarting self-developed operating systems can be regarded as the most humiliating situation that Meta can encounter. Sure enough, Meta responded quickly, and just three hours later, at 1 a.m. Beijing time, Bloomberg published an article saying that a Meta spokesperson refuted a previous report by the information network: "Neither terminating nor shrinking our operating system business." ”
An hour later, Gabriel Aul, Meta's vice president, even sent a tweet reiterating "Reality Labs' persistence in building the operating system and saying it "will continue to invest in that work."
Maybe it wasn't enough, he simply hired: "We're expanding the team, not shrinking, come and join us." ”
B
Zuckerberg's strong desire to build a world of his own in the metaverse stems from the long-term shackles of the "pre-metaverse" era.
Zuckerberg's social empire, whether it's his son Facebook or the later adopted Instagram, has to look at the faces of Google's Android and Apple's IOS operating system. Friction has continued for more than a decade. The operating system's interference with the acquisition and use of applications, the extraction of commissions, etc., has repeatedly attracted public complaints from Zuckerberg.
Let's take a relatively recent example. In the summer of 2020, Apple introduced iOS 14, and one of the updates was a new privacy rule for IDFA. According to this new privacy regulation, the advertising identifier IDFA that was originally turned on by default can be manually turned off by the user. Once closed, apps can no longer collect and correlate user actions across apps, tracking user digital behavior.
The inability to track user behavior will lead to a decrease in the accuracy of the user portrait response in seconds, resulting in advertisers being reluctant to run targeted ads, and the advertising business is very important to Facebook. Facebook has publicly stated that the new policy will cost it 50% of its advertising revenue.
As for the idea of a metacosm, Zuckerberg sees it as an alternative to smartphones in the future. The new world, the new starting point, and Zuckerberg, who is not willing to "whisper", naturally wants to fight hard before everything is still a foregone conclusion.
While the Google Android-based open source system is still in use, this is not a long-term solution for Meta.
On the one hand, using Android does not mean that it is convenient.
On the other hand, the giants that already master operating systems — Microsoft, Apple, Google — could all be competitors in The New Battlefield for Meta.
Self-developed operating system, Zuckerberg is unlikely to give up so quickly, as to whether it can be done, it depends on the creation. Although the "misunderstanding" has been clarified, the challenge does exist, and today Lukovsky has confirmed to the foreign media that he has indeed left Meta and joined Google.