1/ parse wasn't a core service for facebook, nor a relevant source of a revenu AND their API wasn't standard. Those points combined made it very risky for people to use it.
2/ since they open sourced their API now, and the service was a paid service, there's a very high probability that someone will very soon create a 100% compatible PAAS.
3/ firebase will be next to shutdown. Not because they suck, but simply because they're exactly in the same case (proprietary,non standard, critical technology, held by a company who don't really care about it for its money service). People won't sign up on firebase anymore, so they will have to shut down quite soon.
4/ Every non core project run by facebook should be looked upon with extra caution now. Yes, that includes occulus. They're clearly not going to sell many devices, and gaming console maker (aka Sony) will have the lion's share of the gaming market. So, expect fb to shut it down in 2 or 3 years if it doesn't get a very large marketshare (the only use case large enough i can think of that is not gaming being porn).
5/ I personnaly would be really hesitant now to run on something like google app engine. I wouldn't be surprised to see google and microsoft moving forward api standardization for core cloud services on a much faster pace. Except amazon, nobody is really safe now.
I agree that Firbase is a ool option and probably safe as they recently took steps to lock it into the google account. Someone will inevitably say google kills projects often, but they probably won't kill this.
Alphabet's strategy seems to be yo onboard new developers and get into mobile.Firebase is a good way to begin that pipeline allowing new devs into googles ecosystem and controlling how tags work on websites by creating their own library and pushing people in.
Why did parse fail though? Seems like a good strategy for Facebook.
To be fair, would they say anything else? Even if Google had plans of shutting them down in 3 months, it's not like they'd come out and say, "Oh, we'll be joining parse next quarter."
I think you're pretty far off the mark when you say that Oculus is at risk if they don't sell enough devices.
Of course, we have to go off of what Oculus and FB says, but they are working to create an ecosystem and market for VR experiences and seem to be pushing VR forward wherever they can; look at Oculus Studio and the work they're doing to create interactive movies, as well as the software deals with partners like Samsung's Gear VR. Plus, VR is one of the three stated future pillars of FB (the other two are AI and Internet-for-all).
I'd be willing to put money on Oculus being around and still being a viable business for FB in three years, even if the Oculus Rift hardware is not a commercial success. If the hardware is not popular, they will still be pushing VR forward in other ways. VR is a huge opportunity and is likely to be the entertainment medium of the future. I sincerely doubt FB is going to be overreacting and shutting down Oculus the way you describe.
Or maybe it will turn out that VR is just a niche market or passing fad (for the Nth time). Or it won't gain the required traction within the FB executive's patience threshold. Both are very likely outcomes.
> VR is a huge opportunity and is likely to be the entertainment medium of the future
They probably have a lot of patent, and i agree that VR is not going away. I was talking about occulus as a fb branded hardware and development platform.
> gaming console maker (aka Sony) will have the lion's share of the gaming market
Given that you need a bleeding-edge $1000 PC to run Oculus at a smooth, nausea-free 70hz, I don't see how Sony is going to get similar performance from a 2-year-old $400 console.
Maybe a couple generations down the road, but not in the next few years.
That completely depends on how graphics intensive a particular game is. Sure you won't be running the Witcher 3 at 90 fps, but it's definitely possible if you make a game that is more stylized and less photo realistic.
They're also apparently using some kind of frame interpolation to run 60hz games at 120hz. How well that works to stop nausea I don't know, but the reviews from early demos I've seen look promising.
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> google and microsoft moving forward api standardization
Google maybe.
Microsoft never - if it's one thing that is in their DNA than it's they always have undocumented API edge cases, so they can change them right in front of a competitor - they have a very long history doing that. Ask Apple (Word, IE, etc), DOS-competitors (DR-DOS, etc), IBM (OS/2, DOS, OpenOffice, Lotus, etc), "open" Office format (docx, xlsx, pptx = weird XML serialization of their old binary OLE2 based Office format), Win16API, Win32API, NTkernel API, and many more.
1/ parse wasn't a core service for facebook, nor a relevant source of a revenu AND their API wasn't standard. Those points combined made it very risky for people to use it.
2/ since they open sourced their API now, and the service was a paid service, there's a very high probability that someone will very soon create a 100% compatible PAAS.
3/ firebase will be next to shutdown. Not because they suck, but simply because they're exactly in the same case (proprietary,non standard, critical technology, held by a company who don't really care about it for its money service). People won't sign up on firebase anymore, so they will have to shut down quite soon.
4/ Every non core project run by facebook should be looked upon with extra caution now. Yes, that includes occulus. They're clearly not going to sell many devices, and gaming console maker (aka Sony) will have the lion's share of the gaming market. So, expect fb to shut it down in 2 or 3 years if it doesn't get a very large marketshare (the only use case large enough i can think of that is not gaming being porn).
5/ I personnaly would be really hesitant now to run on something like google app engine. I wouldn't be surprised to see google and microsoft moving forward api standardization for core cloud services on a much faster pace. Except amazon, nobody is really safe now.
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