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CNBC has been keeping up with several former Facebook employees who have worked on the social network on hardware projects. The report provides an overview of the difficulties faced by Facebook to successfully enter the hardware sector.
In April 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired Regina Dugan to head up Building 8. Dugan led the DARPA research organization of the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2012, and then joined Google to create the ATAP research unit, which notably developed the Tango project and Google Soli gesture control.
For Facebook, starting in 2016, she was to build and manage Building 8, the social networking hardware research division that was to develop Moonshot projects as a brain-computer interface and commercialize consumer hardware.
The goal: to diversify the sources of income of Facebook. Because the social network makes 93% of its sales with online advertising. The acquisition of the start-up Oculus VR in March 2014, amounting to $ 3 billion, was also part of the investment strategy in hardware.
Dissatisfaction within the team
Zuckerberg wanted the CNBC report to include a similar smart home device to Amazon Echo in the Facebook product portfolio. Building 8 then developed the video chat device portal.
In June 2017, Facebook showed selected employees a series of very secret prototypes from the research department, he continues. Employees would have attended a first version of Portal as well as other experiences, including a brain-computer interface and an AR device designed to commemorate Iron Man's hologram computers. .
CNBC sources report that some employees have been disturbed by the secrecy and high cost of building research.8 Each year, the Partners, Consultants and Events Department reportedly spent more than one hundred million dollars. In addition, an extreme time constraint prevailed to bring the portal as quickly as possible to the market.
A friend of Zuckerberg takes the scepter
To speed things up, Zuckerberg appointed Andrew Bosworth, Chief of Material, who was to oversee Building 8 and Oculus. Bosworth joined the company in 2006 and is a loyal Zuckerberg, but he has no hardware experience.
Two months later, in October 2017, Regina Dugan left Facebook a year and a half after hiring. According to her former colleagues, it is unclear whether she was fired or whether she went there voluntarily.
Rafa Camargo took the interim position of Rugan. According to Camargo, Bosworth has had a significant impact on the production and marketing of Facebook devices since Oculus Go in May 2018.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Bosworth decided that it was not the time to put Portal on the market and asked for design changes, the CNBC report said. The smart display finally appeared in November 2018 in two models and with a flap for the camera.
Building 8 is dissolved
The devices sold the IDC market research institute according to critics: only 54,000 units would have been discontinued since the launch in the market. A Facebook spokesman told CNBC that this number was not true, but did not mention any official sales figures. The number of VR glbades sold up to now by the company is also unknown.
A month after the launch of Portal, Building 8 was disbanded and the main team was moved to a new department called Portal, while Moonshot projects were taken over by Facebook Reality Labs.
What's next with the Facebook material? In the spring, CNBC confirmed that it was working on, among other things, an AI badistant for future Portal and Oculus devices.
According to Bosworth, new portal models will be released later this year and Camargo has confirmed to CNBC that Facebook is working on new RA products. There will be more news in this direction at the next Oculus Connect.
Cover photo: Facebook, Source: CNBC
Learn more about Facebook and Oculus:
Facebook: former colleagues report a difficult case of computer equipment what was last modified: August 4, 2019 by Tomislav Bezmalinovic
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