Book Your Face
Some initial thoughts on Facebook Horizon Workrooms
I’ve gone out of my way not to read any of the coverage of Facebook’s new VR meeting system, Horizon Workrooms, yet because I’ve wanted to jot down some gut reaction thoughts first. Obvious and fun snark aside, it’s interesting in ways both good and bad.
First and foremost, Facebook continues to straddle a very fine line with all of their recent PR work. The company is in the crosshairs more and more each day for being too ingrained in our lives and as such, influencing humanity in ways that are at best unknown and at worst, potentially disastrous. And so they… launch a product where you must strap a computer to your face with screens just inches from your eyes to more fully immerse yourself in Facebook. Okay.
I get it. We all get it. They’re in a tight spot and yet have to keep innovating. But I mean, can we just take a breather for like six months and not launch Meetings Book for your Face? Blasphemous in innovation-first Silicon Valley, I know. But at some point, the room has to be read. This is all certainly not turning down the heat.
At the same time, I was wrong (well, sort of) in this regard with their Portal product. Back then, the company announced a Facebook-connected camera for your living room — complete with the ability to follow you around! — at the height of the Cambridge Analytica privacy fiasco. Sheesh. And yet, it ended up being a good product and more importantly, in the right place at the right time (which they could not have known at the time) given the COVID lockdowns everyone was about to enter. This was a product Apple should have built but Facebook did, and so kudos to them for doing it even when they had no business doing it from an optics perspective, if nothing else.
And maybe that’s the key here too. If the Horizon Workrooms product is actually great — awful name, aside — maybe it can overcome the various stigmas. Both on the VR front but also the Facebook front. And the company is clearly betting that this is the right time once again, with the world perhaps forever changed with regard to remote work.
Facebook sees an opening to own this future and is going for it, pushback and dystopian snark be damned. If they’re right, the PR headaches of now ultimately won’t matter, as they never do. But are they right?
For a system like this to work, you have to believe that everyone in the near future owns an Oculus, or at least some VR headset. That’s almost for sure not going to be the case naturally, as it hasn’t been the case over the first several VR hype cycles dating back decades.¹ But Facebook has been pushing the industry forward in spite of pushback. To their credit, unlike so many companies which move into a field and quickly retreat when it looks like a money pit that will never move the bottom line, Facebook continues to pour resources into VR. And it is moving that world forward, albeit slowly.
Still, again, for Horizon Workrooms to work we need headsets in every home. The most obvious way to do that is to have companies subsidize them for employees, just as they issue laptops. You could see Facebook doing this, of course. But would other companies, especially if it’s a Facebook product they’re subsidizing? Again, maybe, if the product is good enough. If it’s something which is actually increasing productivity at home and enabling this future of work.
But this type of thing fails if not everyone is bought in.² And that’s both technical but also social. We’ve all heard by now about the notion where “hybrid” work leads to a bifurcated workforce of the in-office “somebodies” and the at-home “nobodies”. This need for a more level playing field is a real concern. Facebook will say Horizon Workrooms is an answer, but again, only if everyone — including those in the office — are doing meetings in Horizon Workrooms. In VR.
Maybe this is an entry point into the Metaverse which Mark Zuckerberg wants to exist. But maybe it also backfires if this works and Horizon Workrooms and by extension, Facebook, becomes synonymous with work in VR and so they can’t cross the chasm between work and play in the same way that people don’t want to use the tools they use at work all day when they leave the office.
Aha! But if you’re never at an office to actually leave…
Anyway, Facebook clearly feels the need to keep pushing here because they clearly feel the pressure from pretty much all sides that Facebook, the core service, is now bad for the world and its reign needs to end, either naturally or through regulation. If it’s not quite rotten, it’s rotting. And most everyone has had enough, including everyone still addicted to it. The problem was inherent: once Facebook got to worldwide scale, it reflected back the world which it swallowed. That is to say, Facebook might not be bad by itself, but some people are bad. And by way of onboarding the world, Facebook also took on those people. And those people tend to try to do things to ruin the world for everyone else. Facebook inadvertently gave them the best tool ever created for that at scale in the form of a little blue app.
So it’s time to move on from that app. Zuckerberg keeps trying. But like Michael Corleone, they keep pulling him back in. Because Facebook also needs those billions of users to have any shot of launching their next big thing. Which is undoubtedly why we’re getting Facebook, but for work, strapped to your face.
Do I think this will work? I mean, no. I think it boils down to a combination of factors not working in their favor. I think the perception challenges are a bit too acute right now and will be for the foreseeable future. I think the hardware scale challenges aren’t going to be overcome anytime soon. And I think we don’t yet know what the “future of work” is actually going to look like. (My boring guess would be that when the pandemic finally subsides, it will look more like it did right before the pandemic than say, everyone in VR collaborating with cartoon avatars.)
There’s that snark again. But you know what I mean. This isn’t meant to be harsh, it’s meant to be reality. Kudos to Facebook for continuing to push the envelope here even in the face of endless fiascos and clearly just not giving much of a fuck about the perception. But they’re going to need to keep pushing. Hard. For a while, I suspect. And that sadly means keeping the little blue machine printing money and pain.
Published on August 20, 2021 📆Written from London, England 🇬🇧Written on an iPhone 12 Pro 📱
¹ Let’s see… 1992’s The Lawnmower Man (the movie, not the Stephen King short story which had nothing to do with VR). Who could forget this brilliant scene in 1994’s Disclosure? 1995’s Virtual Boy. And on and on. GV invested in AltspaceVR several years back (which now clearly just seems ahead of its time, and is still going) before it was acquired by Microsoft, with some of the team going on to work at… yes, Facebook.
² And beyond the idea of companies subsidizing this, as a consumer product, we probably need to get closer to the $100-$200 price points for mass adoption to be viable. Even then, need I remind everyone that they’re rather bulky computers that you strap to your face?
