扎克伯格的2015年邮件：AR/VR 战略
查看引用/信息源请点击：techemails
2015年的一封邮件
（映维网Nweon 2023年02月04日）Meta正在全力押注AR/VR。实际上，这家公司的元宇宙之路可以说是从2014年收购Oculus开始。自那以后，首席执行官扎克伯格就开始全方位构建自己的未来愿景。日前，社区曝光了一封扎克伯格于2015年撰写的电子邮件，而他在其中谈到了VR的潜力、相关竞争格局以及Facebook（改名前）将如何主宰这一领域。
下面是具体的整理，请注意，下面的邮件发于2015年，所以请区分邮件的时态/时间描述。同时，当时Facebook尚未改名为Meta。
发件人：马克·扎克伯格
日期：2015年6月22日10:54 AM
主题：VR / AR strategy and One
随着我们最近关于加快VR/AR工作的讨论，我认为阐明我们通过投资实现的目标会非常有用。
我们的愿景是，VR/AR将在大约10年后成为仅次于移动设备的下一个主要计算平台。它可能甚至比智能手机更为普遍，尤其是当我们实现AR的时候，因为你可以随时启用。它比智能手机更自然，因为它使用了我们正常的人类视觉和手势系统。它甚至更具性价比，因为一旦你拥有了一个优秀的VR/AR系统，你就不再需要购买手机、电视或其他，它们可以成为数字商店中的应用程序。
除了通过加速和塑造这项技术的发展来为人类带来的纯粹价值之外，我们同时有三个主要的商业目标：战略、品牌和财务。
战略目标最为明确。我们在移动领域方面非常容易受到谷歌和苹果的攻击，因为它们是主要的移动平台。我们希望在下一波计算浪潮中拥有更强大的战略地位。我们只有通过构建主要平台和关键应用程序才能实现这一目标。
我将在下面进一步讨论平台和关键应用的主要元素，但现在请记住，我们需要成功构建一个主要平台和关键应用程序，从而提高我们在下一个平台的战略地位。如果我们只构建关键应用程序而不构建平台，我们只能像现在这样。如果我们只构建平台而不构建关键应用程序，我们可能处境更糟。我们需要两者兼而有之。
从时间的角度来看，下一个平台越早普及，我们在谷歌和苹果所主导的移动领域中生存的时间就越短，我们就能活得越好。时间越短，我们的生态就越不容易受到他人的影响。所以，我们的目标不仅是在VR/AR中获胜，而且是要加速其到来。这是我现在收购一系列企业并增加投资的部分理由，而不是继续等待，看看他们情况怎样后再出手。通过加速这一领域的发展，我们正在减少我们在移动领域所遭受的脆弱性。
品牌目标同样十分简单。我们品牌最薄弱的部分是创新。对于作为一家依靠挖角最优秀工程师来构建未来的科技公司而言，这是我们的弱点。拥有一个创新的品牌不仅会在招聘方面带来回报，同时会在我们的所有产品和其他努力中带来回报。
创新品牌来自于打造有形的新产品。我们现在在VR/AR方面的工作就是最好的例子。我们的核心社交网络已经不再是最创新的产品，Internet.org只是一次扩展而不是发明，而Al尚未落地成形。我们可以做更多的事情，以在这些领域讲述我们的故事，但在未来5-10年里，VR/AR的成功具有最大的创新潜力。当然，我们需要在VR/AR方面取得成功才能获得这种品牌效益，但如果我们做到了，这将是非常有价值的。
财务目标最为具体，我将在这里讨论我们希望开放VR/AR生态系统的哪些方面，以及我们希望从哪些方面获利。
我认为你可以将生态系统分为三个主要部分：应用/体验、平台服务、以及硬件/系统。在我对普适VR/AR的看法中，它们是按重要性进行排序（但值得注意的是，苹果颠倒了这一顺序并打造出世界最具价值的公司）。
对于关键应用，大家应该都能想到：社交和媒体消费，尤其是沉浸式视频。游戏至关重要，但游戏更多是受热门作品驱动，所以拥有关键游戏似乎并不比确保它们存在于我们的平台更加重要。我希望每个人都会使用社交工具和媒体消费工具，如果我们在这些领域取得成功，我们将能打造出一家大企业。当然，我们将需要大量投资和专门的战略，从而在这些领域建立最佳服务。
但现在我断言，建立社交服务是我们的核心能力，所以我将择日再作单独阐述。
我们的平台愿景是打造诸多应用程序使用的关键服务：身份、内容和Avatar市场、应用分发商店、广告、支付和其他社交功能。服务具有网络效应、稀缺性以及货币化潜力等共同属性。使用我们的内容市场、应用商店或支付系统的开发者越多，它们就会变得越好，而我们就能更有效地赚钱。
有几点值得注意。首先，这些服务应该是跨平台的。大多数服务都可以在iOS、Android、桌面等平台提供。在Android平台，我们可以向通过Play分发的应用提供服务。但如果我们的应用切换到我们预加载的商店购买，我们甚至不需要支付谷歌30%的抽成。其次，这个平台定义实际上不是技术意义上的操作系统。但在现代操作系统中，主要价值都来自于操作系统供应商在安装了自己操作系统的设备端，充分利用好自己平台的服务。所以，我认为我们的主要平台战略不应该专注于构建一个完全独立的操作系统，而是在所有系统中拥有这些核心平台服务。这将是一个挑战，因为现有的操作系统供应商会试图挤兑我们，但如果我们建立了卓越的服务，并提供了操作系统所需的要素（例如Unity支持），那么我们将很有可能成功。
生态系统的最后一环是硬件/系统。这一类别包括令VR/AR行之有效所需的所有核心技术，但它们单独而言几乎没有可持续的商业价值：头显、控制器、视觉追踪、底层linux和图形API。要确保整体生态系统生存，所有拼图都需要足够优秀。例如，智能手机需要出色的触控屏、电池管理、无线电技术等。但除了品牌、专利和研发团队始终遥遥领先于其他人之外，这同时是生态系统中最难啃的骨头。
出于几个原因，开发硬件和底层系统非常重要。它可以帮助我们加速并影响VR/AR的发展。它为我们提供了一个在所有系统（而不仅仅是我们的系统）中整合平台服务的重要机会。如果我们一直顺利朝目标迈进，它可能会成为一个重要的营收来源，就像苹果一样。
我们对这一领域的总体愿景是，我们提供各种各样的杀手级应用，在平台服务中拥有非常强大的覆盖率（就像谷歌在安卓系统中的覆盖率一样），在硬件和系统方面将足够强大，硬件和系统至少能够支持我们的平台服务目标，最好本身就成为一项营收来源。
为了实现这一愿景，我们需要进行诸多不同的投资。在关键应用中，我们尚没有社交应用产品，视频方面同样十分薄弱。我们需要同时启动两者。在平台服务方面，我们已经开始使用Oculus建立身份、应用商店和支付，但我们落后于Valve和谷歌很多年，我们甚至还没有在Avatar和内容市场起步。在硬件和系统方面，我们在用于VR的头显、控制器和底层SDK方面处于领先地位，但我们没有真正的开发/图形系统，而且在AR方面远远落后。
在未来几年，我们将需要在应用程序、平台服务、开发/图形和AR方面进行重大的投资。其中一些将是收购，一些可以在内部进行。如果我们尝试从零开始在内部构建它们，这可能需要太长的时间或者会失败，从而造成我们的整体战略面临严重风险。为了减少这方面的风险，我们应该从领先的企业中收购一些产品。
鉴于我们自身的优势，我们可能最好在内部构建大多数应用程序和平台服务，同时利用好收购机会，收购我们几乎没有经验的大部分核心VR/AR和3D技术。这就是为什么我支持收购Unity，期望我们在未来几年内收购一家AR公司，并择机收购VR应用团队。我同时一直在鼓励我们自己加大对平台服务的内部投资。
一个重要的问题是，如果我们的战略是赢得关键应用程序和平台服务，为什么我们需要在硬件和系统方面进行如此巨大的投资呢？当我们考虑在未来十年向Unity投资数十亿美元时，这是一个特别重要的问题。为了说明拥有这项核心技术的价值，我将概述拥有Unity的优势。
第一，Unity将帮助我们打造完成这项整体任务所需的世界级VR/AR体验…
随着时间的推移，有人将需要紧密集成这个生态系统的所有软件和硬件组件，例如硬件方面的头显、控制器和追踪；以及软件方面的Avatar，内容和身份，而Unity在堆栈中处于正确的位置，可以帮助大多数开发人员做到这一点。如果我们拥有Unity，我们可以确保这一点总是发生得很好，发生得很快，并且是在我们的系统中发生。如果我们与Unity进行这种整合，Unreal和其他公司同样会优先为我们提供出色的体验，所以我们可以推动整个市场向前发展。如果我们不拥有Unity，我们则最好是激励他们优先为我们做这件事，但一切会进展得更慢，而最坏的情况是，有人可能会拥有他们，然后阻止这一切发生，或者阻止我们实现这个目标。
在某种程度上，拥有实现任务所依赖的核心技术非常重要。即使存在其他潜在的前进道路，拥有Unity会增加集成机会并降低风险。
第二，Unity将增加对Avatar/内容市场和应用分发商店等关键平台服务的采用。我们将通过将这些服务与Unity集成来实现这一点，从而令它们既卓越又易于使用。
作为卓越性的一个例子，如果我们想确保我们的Avatar或身份系统充分利用Unity，我们将能容易做到这一点。没有其他构建竞争性Avatar系统的人能够修改Unity引擎。我们将继续Unity支持每一个开发环境的承诺，但毫无疑问，拥有Unity将能提高效率，而这会帮助我们成为构建关键服务的最佳供应商。
作为易用性的一个例子，如果我们拥有Unity，我们的关键服务将始终运行出色，运行快速。我们同时可以确实关键服务成为开发者使用的默认服务。我们可以确实开发者从Unity编译的内容与我们的应用商店直接兼容并一键分发到我们的应用商店。
另外，由于我们的关键服务将如此出色和突出地集成到Unity中，这将给其他引擎（如Unreal）带来压力，促使其与我们的主要服务紧密集成，并确保其开发人员拥有相同的访问权限。这将有助于实现我们传播重要平台服务的目标，甚至传播到我们无法控制的平台。
随着时间的推移，增加我们的开发者覆盖将为我们提供更多的机会来集成和追加销售我们的关键平台服务。正如深度依赖谷歌游戏服务的开发者更有可能使用新版Play Service API一样，使用我们的系统来构建VR/AR体验的开发者同样有可能这样。
第三，Unity提高了我们确保其他平台公司支持我们平台服务的能力。如果我们拥有Unity，Android、Windows和iOS都将需要我们支持他们的生态系统。尽管我们不会直接拒绝他们，但我们可以选择在多大程度支持他们。
对于Android和Windows等开放平台，这有助于平衡竞争环境，并有助于确保我们能够继续提供应用商店和其他关键服务。对于iOS，这不会影响苹果阻止我们提供应用商店，但这可能会给我们其他重要的筹码。
另一方面，如果有人收购了Unity或这一新生态系统的任何核心技术组件的领导者，如果收购者心怀敌意并决定不支持我们，我们就有可能被彻底赶出市场。这可能不是突然宣布Unity不再支持Oculus，但谷歌或其他人可以永远不优先考虑改进我们的集成。
从某种程度上说，我们的脆弱是如此的明显，即便这笔交易并没有带来我们最初设想的所有好处，但单单是为了减轻这种风险，Unity就值得我们付出代价。
回到‘未来十年是否值得向Unity和其他核心技术投资数十亿美元’这个问题上，最难评估的是，我们不能肯定地说，如果我们做XXX，我们就会成功。这个生态系统中有许多重要的组成环节，我们可能会受到许多不同的阻碍。但我们可以明确的是，这可以提高了我们创造伟大之物的机会。
考虑到我们有机会在下一个主要的计算浪潮中加强我们的地位，我认为这正在明确地呼吁我们尽一切努力来增加我们成功的机会。几十亿美元的代价十分昂贵，但我们负担得起。我们已经建立起了可以支撑我们为世界带来伟大之物的业务，而AR和VR是我能想象的我们为未来打造的最伟大的产品之一…
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Date: June 22, 2015 10:54 AM
Subject: VR / AR strategy and OneWith our recent discussions about accelerating our work in VR / AR, I thought it would be useful to articulate what goals I hope we accomplish with our investment.
Our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years. It can be even more ubiquitous than mobile – especially once we reach AR – since you can always have it on. It’s more natural than mobile since it uses our normal human visual and gestural systems. It can even be more economical, because once you have a good VR / AR system, you no longer need to buy phones or TV’s or many other physical objects – they can just become apps in a digital store.
Beyond the sheer value we can deliver to humanity by accelerating and shaping the development of this technology, we have three primary business goals: strategic, brand and financial.
The strategic goal is clearest. We are vulnerable on mobile to Google and Apple because they make major mobile platforms. We would like a stronger strategic position in the next wave of computing. We can achieve this only by building both a major platform as well as key apps.
I will discuss the main elements of the platform and key apps further below, but for now keep in mind that we need to succeed in building both a major platform and key apps to improve our strategic position on the next platform. If we only build key apps but not the platform, we will remain in our current position. If we only build the platform but not the key apps, we may be in a worse position. We need to build both.
From a timing perspective, we are better off the sooner the next platform becomes ubiquitous and the shorter the time we exist in a primarily mobile world dominated by Google and Apple. The shorter this time, the less our community is vulnerable to the actions of others. Therefore, our goal is not only to win in VR / AR, but also to accelerate its arrival. This is part of my rationale for acquiring companies and increasing investment in them sooner rather than waiting until later to derisk them further. By accelerating this space, we are derisking our vulnerability on mobile.
The brand goal is also simple. The weakest element of our brand is innovation, which is a vulnerable position for us as a technology company dependent on recruiting the best engineers to build the future. Having an innovative brand will pay dividends not only in recruiting but therefore across all of our products and other efforts as well.
An innovative brand comes from building tangible new products. Our work in VR / AR is the best example we have. Our core social networking work is no longer new, Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and AI is not yet tangible. We can do more to tell our story in each of these areas, but succeeding in VR / AR has the most innovation potential in the next 5-10 years. Of course we need to succeed in VR / AR to gain any of these brand benefits, but if we do, this will be very valuable.
The financial goal is the most specific and this is where I’ll discuss which aspects of the VR / AR ecosystem we want to open up and which aspects we expect to profit from.
I think you can divide the ecosystem into three major parts: apps / experiences, platform services and hardware / systems. In my vision of ubiquitous VR / AR, these are listed in order of importance (although it’s worth noting that Apple has built the world’s most valuable company with a high-end vision by reversing that order).
The key apps are what you’d expect: social communication and media consumption, especially immersive video. Gaming is critical but is more hits driven and ephemeral, so owning the key games seems less important than simply making sure they exist on our platform. I expect everyone will use social communication and media consumption tools, and that we’ll build a large business if we are successful in these spaces. We will need a large investment and dedicated strategy to build the best services in these spaces. For now though, I’ll just assert that building social services is our core competence, so I’ll save elaborating further on that for another day.
The platform vision is around key services that many apps use: identity, content and avatar marketplace, app distribution store, ads, payments and other social functionality. These services share the common properties of network effects, scarcity and therefore monetization potential. The more developers who use our content marketplace or app store or payments system, the better they become and the more effectively we can make money.
It’s worth noting a few things. First, these platform services should be cross platform. Most of the services can be offered on iOS, Android, on desktop, etc. On Android, we can bother offer an app store and offer many of these services to apps distributed through Play – if we app switch to our preloaded marketplace for purchases, we won’t even have to pay Google’s 30% rev share. Second, this platform definition is not actually an OS in the technical sense. In modern OSes, however, most of the value comes from advantaging the OS provider’s own platform services on the devices where its OS is installed. I think our primary platform strategy should not be focusing on building a fully independent OS, but owning these core platform services across all systems. This will be challenging as OS providers will try to push us out, but if we build superior services and provide things OSes need (eg Unity support), then we have a good shot at success.
The last part of the ecosystem is hardware / systems. This category includes all of the core technology required to make VR / AR work but that has little sustainable business value independently: the headsets, controllers, vision tracking, low-level linux and graphics APIs. These pieces all need to be very good for the overall ecosystem to be viable. For example, smartphones needed good touch screens, battery management, radio technology, etc. But aside from brand, patent enforcement and building teams that are consistently far ahead of everyone else, this is the most difficult part of the ecosystem to build into a large business. Even when companies do succeed, no single hardware company gains ubiquity like our vision requires us to do with apps.
Developing hardware and low-level systems is very important for a few reasons. It helps us accelerate and influence the development of VR / AR. It gives us a significant opportunity to integer our platform services across all systems (not just ours). And if we do consistently great work, it could potentially become an important revenue driver like it has for Apple.
Our overall vision for the space is that we will be completely ubiquitous in killer apps, have very strong coverage in platform services (like Google has with Android) and will be strong enough in hardware and systems to at a minimum support our platform services goals, and at best be a business itself.
In order to achieve this vision, there are many different investments we’ll need to make. In key apps, we have no social app effort yet and our video effort is weak. We’re going to need to jumpstart both. In platform services, we’ve started building an identity, app store and payments with Oculus, but we’re years behind Valve and Google, and we haven’t even started on the avatar and content marketplace. In hardware and systems, we are leading in headsets, controllers and low level SDK for VR, but we don’t have a real development / graphics system and we’re far behind on AR.
Over the next few years, we’re going to need to make major new investments in apps, platform services, development / graphics and AR. Some of these will be acquisitions and some can be built in house. If we try to build them all in house from scratch, then we risk that several will take too long or fail and put our overall strategy at serious risk. To derisk this, we should acquire some of these pieces from leading companies.
Given our own strengths, we will probably be best served building most apps and platform services internally while using acquisitions opportunistically, and then acquiring most of the core VR / AR and 3D tech where we have little experience. This is why I am supportive of acquiring Unity, expecting we will acquire an AR company in the next few years and opportunistically acquiring VR app teams, while also consistently encouraging us to ramp up our internal investment on our platform services ourselves.
One important question is that if our strategy is to win key apps and platform services, then why do we need to make such a big investment in hardware and systems? This is an especially important question when we’re considering investing billions of dollars into Unity over the next decade. To illustrate the value of owning this core technology, I’ll outline the advantages of owning Unity.
First, Unity will help us build world class VR / AR experiences required to deliver on this overall mission...
Over time someone will need to tightly integrate al of the software and hardware components of this ecosystem – headset, controllers and tracking on the hardware side; avatars, content and identity on the software side – and Unity is at the right level of the stack to do this for most developers.
If we own Unity, we can ensure this always happens well, happens quickly and happens with our systems. If we do this integration with Unity, the Unreal and others will prioritize delivering great experiences with us as well and we will push the entire market forward. If we don’t own Unity, then at best we can incentivize them to prioritize doing this for us and everything will just move more slowly, but at worst someone may acquire them and block this from happening at all or with us.
At some level, it’s important to own the core technology you depend on to achieve your mission. Even if there is potentially a path forward with it, owning it increases integration opportunities and decreases risk.
Second, Unity will increase the adoption of key platform services like avatar / content marketplace and app distribution store. We will achieve this be integrating these services with Unity to make them both superior and easier to use.
As an example of superiority, if we want to make sure our avatars or identity systems work really well in Unity, well easily be able to do that. No one else building a competing avatar system will be able to modify the Unity engine that everyone uses to support their services in a first class way. We will continue Unity’s promise of supporting every development environment, but there will undoubtedly be efficiencies in owning Unity that will help us be the best in building key services.
As an example of ease of use, because we own Unity, our key services will always work well and work fast. We can also make our key services the defaults that developers use. We can make it so compiling from Unity is directly compatible with and ships to our app store, and so the default avatars and content are using our marketplace format. This does not guarantee our services succeed if they’re not great, but if they are great then it guarantees all developers will have easy access to them.
Further, since our key services will be integrated so well and so prominently into Unity, that will put pressure on other engines like Unreal to do close integrations with our key services as well as to make sure their developers have the same access. This will help achieve our goal of spreading the important platform services – even to platforms we don’t control.
Increasing our developer surface area will give us more opportunities to integrate and upsell our key platform services over time. Just like developers who deeply rely on Google’s Play Services are more likely to use the next Play Service API that comes out, developers who use more of our systems to build their VR / AR experiences will also be likely to use additional services as we build them as well.
Third, Unity increases our ability to ensure other platform companies support our platform services.
If we own Unity, then Android, Windows and iOS will all need us to support them on larger portions of their ecosystems won’t work. While we wouldn’t reject them outright, we will have options for how deeply we support them.
For open platforms like Android and Windows, this helps level the playing field and helps to ensure we can continue offering our app stores and other key services. For iOS, this will not influence Apple to let us offer an app store, but it could give us other important bargaining chips as part of our VR / AR strategy or otherwise.
On the flip side, if someone else buys Unity or the leader in any core technology component of this new ecosystem, we risk being taken out of the market completely if that acquirer is hostile and decides not to support us. Again, this likely wouldn’t be a sudden proclamation that Unity no longer supports Oculus, but Google or someone else would just never prioritize improving our integrations.
To some degree, this downside is such a vulnerability that it is likely worth the cost just to mitigate this risk, even if this deal didn’t come with all of the upsides for which we originally contemplated it.
Going back to the question of whether it is worth investing billions of dollars into Unity and other core technology over the next decade, the most difficult aspect to evaluate is that we cannot definitively say that if we do X, we will succeed. There are many major pieces of this ecosystem to assemble and many different ways we could be hobbled. All we know is that this improves our chances to build something great.
Given the overall opportunity of strengthening our position in the next major wave of computing, I think it’s a clear call to do everything we can to increase our chances. A few billion dollars is expensive, but we can afford it. We’ve built our business so we can build even greater things for the world, and this is one of the greatest things I can imagine us building for the future...
