Basically two seperate Theatre movements, one favored by the posh thr other favored by the working class. The two scenes came to an actual riot on Astor Place and lead to the wealthy retreating from class mixing.
This post doesn't quite comprehend why Meta made a 49% investment instead of an acquisition.
The path Meta chose avoided global regulatory review. FTC, DOJ, etc and their international counterparts could have chosen to review and block an outright acquisition. They have no authority to review a minority investment.
Scale shareholders received a comparable financial outcome to an acquisition, and also avoided the regulatory uncertainty that comes with govt review.
It was win/win, and there's a chance for the residual Scale company to continue to build a successful business, further rewarding shareholders (of which Meta is now the largest), which is just like wildcard upside and was never the point of the original deal.
You are literally correct, but not engaging in the point. Meta shares in Scale are explicitly non-voting shares. Influence/control post minority investment matters as to whether the deal can be reviewed via Clayton Act. Meta did everything they could to avoid regulatory review with this transaction, and it worked.
The point remains wrong even if you pivot to this argument. Every major competitor has cancelled their deals with Scale AI and there are even rumours that the company will wind down and perhaps eventually stop working while key workers are essentially being absorbed into Meta. This is textbook anti-competitive behaviour and more than enough reason to warrant antitrust investigations by oversight agencies in the major markets.
But not because of majority/minority reasons as the other comment implies. It would be utterly ridiculous if you could just buy 49% of each of your competitors without any possibility for the government to interfere.
I agree that this is a possible reason. Meta wants to move fast and m&a is too slow for their tastes. I make the case in the article though that the actual acquisition doesn't really make sense for metas core business, but I agree it's possible.
I disagree that this is a win/win. Scale stock is still illiquid, and people who remain at scale or have scale stock are now stuck with shares that are actually less valuable -- even though the market price has ostensibly gone up, the people who made the stock valuable are gone
Shareholders retain their stock, but also received a dividend equivalent to selling all their shares at a premium to the previous valuation. It is actually an incredible deal for them. (Source: I'm one of them.)
O shit really? That's a massive update and possibly invalidates a lot of this article. It's also the first I've heard of this -- can you tell me more? Are you saying everyone essentially got bought out? (if you want to dm me in case its still pseudo-private, feel free to at theahura at gmail)
ETA: there's now an update header on the article based on this information
Reportedly the only reason they did this at all is that Wang asked to get a return for investors and employees. It was not Meta who wanted to own any part of Scale (makes sense too, they are already users of Scale data and don't really need anything they get from owning Scale as a company / business).
Socratic by Google still exists today and is a widely beloved app based on reviews. They had to rewrite the code and infrastructure, but "killing off the app" implies that they just shut things down. That never happened.
As for "happy story", I think the founders of Socratic learned a lot. Shreyans is just trying to share his learnings here. Not celebrate or mourn.
The deck plus the OEM dock with mouse, keyboard and monitor makes for a nice, cheap Linux desktop that you can grab-and-go to play games. The dock is really seamless, always works right away. If you're programming, I wouldn't recommend Deck without the dock.
I'm surprised they didn't snap up Unity before it went public. C# is the main language, cross platform deployment that goes well with .NET's new cross platform story and there are strong commercial markets for Unity like Movies, TV and Architecture that could benefit from Microsoft's enterprise sales force and relationships.
Next headline: MS to acquire Epic Games? Tencent is in the way there.
Really, I could see them launching their own engine. Think of all the studios and talent they have now. They have the engines behind Halo, CoD, WoW, Overwatch. Could build an Unreal competitor.
idTech is cutting edge tech. Their team is one of the best in the industry, second to none, competing with Epic, Insomniac and Naughty Dog. But it is not engine for general use, not now. It does one thing(FPS), and does it extremely well. But it lacks tools that you would need to create games of another genres. Things like advanced animation tools, dialogue systems, quest systems, ways to handle vast open worlds, etc.
idTech would be great for Halo and Call of Duty. But it isn't great for The Elder Scrolls, Starcraft, Gears, and many different games Microsoft Studios are working on. EA already tried to make every studio to use Frostbite for every single game and ended up with disasters like Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda.
>> EA already tried to make every studio to use Frostbite for every single game and ended up with disasters like Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda.
By what measure are these games considered disasters? I was under the impression they were critically well-received and sold a decent amount each. DA:I was a better game than DA:O 2, for example (at least IMO).
Regardless, I fail to see what the engine has to do with anything, considering they both presented noticeable graphical and mechanical upgrades over their prequels.
Mass Effect Andromeda was a disaster. Months after release Bioware Montreal was eliminated as a separate entity. They weren't even allowed to make already planned DLCs. It became a meme because of poor quality. And a lot of blame can be put on Frostbite.
Inquisition's development was a disaster due to poor tools. Pax 2013 demo, for example, was faked because no one knew what gameplay would look like(A YEAR BEFORE RELEASE), and it was mostly caused by missing engine systems. Game turned out to be OK though.
I am having a hard time understanding what the Frostbite engine had to do with any of this. Anything you can point to besides your opinion on the matter?
Battlefield is a multiplayer first person shooter. It doesn't need a dialogue editor, save system, third person camera, a lot of systems that help support advanced AI, and many other things that the Bioware game would need. Hence Frostbite didn't have all these things. They needed to be developed from scratch DURING the production. Which means half of the team was unable to work properly due to the lack of tools.
ME:A and DA:I had dialogues a save system, third person camera, etc. Why were they disasters if they were very successful in their own right? I don't understand what you are trying to get at.
Seems to me the engine was perfectly capable of doing everything you wrote it can't do and both games were successful deliverables.
That reminds me of Amazon - I've been "unbundling" my purchases from Amazon due to shipping delays. I still think it's a useful place to find /which/ product I want to buy, but once I figure that out, or if I already have, I head over to the product's own website and buy it there. Examples of my recent purchases - diapers, toys, herbs and spices. In all of these examples the product has shipped within a day and received within a few days.
Good point, but unfortunately on a lot of vendor sites, the checkout experience is still sub-par, some require you to create an account (Annoying if you know it's just a one-time purchase). On amazon, it's click and done. The shipping delays aren't universal; I recently ordered coffee from there and it it got delivered within 2 days (prime customer).
On the checkout experience front, I notice that's been changing lately, especially with Shopify shopfronts. (e.g. jrwatkins.com)
The experience is even more frictionless than Amazon's, especially on a mobile device that supports mobile payments. With Apple Pay, the checkout process is literally just clicking the checkout button, then scanning your face/thumbprint, and done. No account creation, no credit card number is sent (token), address/email etc. are filled out transparently.
Kind of similar to the HotelTonight experience where you're able to book a hotel in less than 3 minutes.
he's talking about receiving his goods a day or more earlier, and you are talking about a couple of minutes longer sitting in your chair typing in the account information. Your customer service point does point out a benefit, but it doesn't address the consumer need expressed in the previous comment.
Maybe Google should know better than to "pluck" copyrighted images from people's sites and display them out of context on their own site while serving their own ads.
Talking about unbundling on connectors.. is there something like Zapier for large enterprise?
Also, would be nice there is an standard way to develop these connectors for interchange
You're talking about Presense, which is the point at which your brain flips and is convinced what its seeing is real.
Michael Abrash has a wonderful deck he wrote while at Valve about what it will take for VR to create Presense in the viewer. It's worth a read if you care about how we'll navigate past the uncanny valley of VR you describe: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...
Since people might not be familiar with the term yet, I feel it's useful to point out that it's spelled "presence" with a 'c', as in, you feel as if you were actually present in a virtual reality.
