*all we needed was the technical leader of the company that produced the product to...

the same could be said for pretty much any change or update rolled out by any of these companies.

Why is this sad? I’m having a hard time understanding the thought you are communicating. It seems cool that a CTO had fun and that motivated him to enable ADB for everyone?

Is there any company set up so that the CEO's whim isn't a single point of failure?

> Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure?

It doesn't sound that surprising, does it?

> Any idea what changed?

sadly, or fortunately I am not at facebook anymore, so I don't have the inside track on what changed.

> Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure?

Kinda. Zuck sets direction, and he has key interests. The thing that really makes him happy is cutting edge research and new features. The thing that passes him by completely is product experience. Oculus is a great example of that. The user experience was/is trash. the time to fun is/was too high and was for a long time. Carmak spent ages saying "we can't compete on hardware specs, we can compete on ecosystem and experience" he lost that argument.

Outside of zuck there are only a few areas that actually make decisions and communicate them properly, one is monetisation/advertising and the other is Infra planning. _Everything_ else relies on people churning initiatives and seeing what sticks. With loose coordination at the centre based on who know who and who manages to convince others that "this is a Zuck priority, or related to one"

It felt very much like having a Boy king. The Boy king liked playing with toys, and if you made a toy for the king you were in favour. The boring parts were handled by "evil advisors" who are there because they don;t threaten the king's power. Everyone around the boy king is there to gain favour.

I think it'd be pretty weird if people and teams inside a company go just go rogue against the CEO.

> Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure?

When I was there (pre-Covid) it was sort of a worst-of-all-worlds situation, compared to other firms.

On the one hand, Zuck maintains an absolute majority of voting shares, so what he say literally goes, with the board having no real authority to rein him in. If your project is something he takes a direct interest in, you are automatically subject to his whims.

On the other, Meta highly values the idea that they are a pretty flat org with no centralised command and control structure. So if your project is not under the baleful gaze of Zuck, there's a good chance that nobody in the executive suite has any fucking idea what is going on in your part of the company.

Contrast this to Bezos-era Amazon, where Bezos would sometimes directly intervene in pet projects like the FirePhone, but the entire company has a strong reporting hierarchy, and executives are expected to maintain direct command-and-control at all times over their reports (i.e. when Bezos sent one of the dreaded question-mark emails, the entire management chain damn well better be able to get their story straight top-to-bottom by the end of day)

With enough encryption, obfuscation, and security-through-obscurity, you can make it extremely difficult to obtain those keys.

Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony ship consoles that are the target of a very motivated black market/cheating industry, and it usually takes years before any serious leaks surface.

We bought two portals for elderly relatives, predominantly for video calling, and I don't think there has been another product, then or since, that fitted that use case as well, especially with people who maybe aren't as familiar with smartphones.

So somewhat frustrating when it all started to wind down various bits of functionality disappeared a bit at a time, until finally you had something that would receive calls, but not be able to make them - and perhaps not even that any more.

(About the only downside I saw on it was the messenger vs whatsapp tussle caused a bit too much confusion).

But it was a solid bit of household tech for several years, so +1 for that!

> So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.

Hnnnnnn

yup, the empire building and land grabs. yup, I had forgotten about the early days before maui was actually universal and people needed different tools to flash different devices.

i had a portal at home for work. great product for VC, i tried using one with my parents and my dad kept it in the trunk of his car outside because that's how negative the facebook brand equity was.

If you have an Apple TV it can use an iPhone as a camera for FaceTime (you put it under your TV temporarily). Works great, presuming you already have some other reason to have the hardware.

Even when the drivers are open source, it's far from easy. I'm thinking about these old Linux 4.2 touch screen drivers, they are there, fully open-source and despite that, almost none of them are in modern mainline.

Samsung is actually the worst offender in the Android world for making variants.

Each device usually has 5 versions for each market (US, EU, China, Korea, Rest of the world) + individual board revisions.

And that's not counting the massive amount of devices they produce outside the flagships.

Let's pick the Galaxy S10 for example, you have the S10, S10+, S10e, S10 Lite, S10 5G. The US ones are on Snapdragon SOC, the other ones on Exynos SOC and each region has additional quirks...