Maxim Perumal argues VR failed because the industry never told people what it's actually for. Apple sold computers by imagining working from home. VR companies just promise to replace Zoom, which nobody wants.
The elephant in the room is, for most people, VR has been pretty disappointing, right? It's not something many people are looking forward to. There are very few people that are sort of sitting around and saying, oh, I'm so excited for the future of VR, right? I think as an industry, we've done a pretty bad job at painting a very exciting future of what using VR might be like. And I think that's something super important. If you look at the desktop computer, if you look at the phone, those movements, at the end of the day, it's not just building technology, it's about convincing those people to buy it and use it every single day. Companies like Apple back in the days, they did an excellent job at painting a picture of why you should be excited about desktop computers. There's this ad that I love from 1987. I think it's called How to Conduct Your Business from Home. It's just this full magazine ad. Where you see someone dressed in a very relaxed attire, no suits, just a shirt. He's sitting there, he has his Macintosh, laying his legs on the desk in his room, in his bedroom. There's a bed. It's this mix of business and casual. And you have this subtext talking about how the future is incredibly exciting because in the future, You'll be able to work from home. You'll be able— all those things that you had to go to the office to do, you'll be able to do them from home. Next time an idea sort of runs through your mind when you're in the shower, the computer is just nearby. You can go in there and work on it. Next time you have a big sprint and important things need to get done, you'll be able to get them done from home. And And I think that drove a lot of the adoption for the desktop computer is that we had those very powerful images of what an exciting future with that tech would be like. And when I look at VR right now, I think the elephant in the room is if I ask you, hey, what is VR for? Who is it for? Would you be able to answer that?
Yeah. No, no, not sincerely.
Right.
I would be able to give you a satisfactory answer, but I really don't envision the deep application in which we're going to use it on an everyday basis.
And it's not only just using it on an everyday basis, it's imagining something that is genuinely exciting. When Meta comes out there and explains that we're going to be doing all those things in a VR headset, you can kind of picture it, but it does not sound that exciting, right? If I tell you that you're going to replace your Zoom meeting with a VR headset, you're like, okay, yeah, and so what?
Fair enough.
Why do I care, right? So that's the first thing to recognize. Most people don't have this exciting view of VR. And I think something very important is to collectively build a very exciting idea, an image of what VR should be like.
