alt Hacker News> They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted.
Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.
Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:
* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.
* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.
* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.
* 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.
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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!
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.
> 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.