时逢Quest Pro发布，我在查找资料的过程中，找到了一封2015年扎克伯格写给高管的内部邮件，描绘了 AR/VR 的十年规划，以及收购 Unity 的可行性。现在，我们能以事后复盘的上帝视角，看看小扎的梦想实现了多少，这封信也解释了这七年来小扎的很多行为。

哔哩哔哩，，，

一封2015年的书信——小扎的AR/VR梦

小程序

下面附上邮件全文。

（英文原文在前，我的中文翻译在后）

From: Mark Zuckerberg

Date: June 22, 2015 10:54 AM

Subject: VR / AR strategy and One

With 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.orgis extending something rather than inventing it, and Al 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 l'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 l'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 APls. 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, l'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...

来自：马克扎克伯格

日期：2015年6月22日

主题：VR/AR 战略和 One

我们最近讨论了加速我们在 VR / AR 领域的工作，我认为我需要写这么一封邮件来详细阐述为什么这个投资有助于实现我们的目标。

我们的愿景是：VR / AR 会在大约 10 年内取代手机成为下一个主要的计算平台。它会比手机更加普及，尤其是当我们实现 AR的时候，因为你可以日常佩戴 AR。它符合人类日常的用眼方式，使用手势系统，所以会比手机更自然。它甚至更划算，因为你拥有了好的 VR / AR 系统之后，就不再需要手机，电视，或者其他很多实体的物体，它们都将变成数字商店里的一个个 App

除了要用加速发展这种科技来为人类提供巨大价值之外，我们还有三个主要目标：战略，品牌和财务。

战略目标最清晰。我们在谷歌和苹果的手机平台上非常脆弱，因为他们造出了主流的移动平台。我们需要在下一次计算浪潮中占领重要的战略位置。为了达到这个目标，我们只有一个办法：同时构建主流平台和关键的 App

我待会儿再展开讲平台和关键应用。现在请牢记，我们需要同时在构建主流平台和关键应用上取得成功才能改善我们在下一个平台上的战略位置。如果我们只有关键 App 没有平台，那就依然处于我们现在的位置。如果我们只有平台没有关键应用，我们将处于更糟糕的位置。我们需要同时构建这两个。

从时间角度，我们需要尽快。下一个平台来得越快，我们现在这种寄人篱下依靠谷歌苹果的日子就能越早结束。寄人篱下的日子越短，越能减少别人对我们的威胁。所以，我们的目标，不仅仅是赢下 AR/VR，还要加速它的到来。这就是我收购很多公司并且追加投资加速它们发展的一部分原因，要未雨绸缪。加速这个过程，就是在减少我们在手机平台上的风险。

品牌目标很简单。我们品牌最薄弱的元素就是创新，作为依靠招募最好的工程师来建造未来的科技公司，这让我们处于很脆弱的位置。拥有一个创新的品牌形象不仅能招募到优秀人才，还能让我们在产品和其他方面获益。

创新的品牌形象来自于创造有形的新产品。我们目前在 VR / AR 领域的工作就是最好的例子。我们核心的社交网络业务已经不再新鲜，互联网只是延展了一些功能而非创造新产品，AI 目前还摸不到。我们可以在这么多的领域里讲故事，但是，在未来 5-10年内在 VR / AR 领域获得成功是最有创新潜力的事情。当然，我们需要在 VR / AR 领域获得成功才能获得这些品牌优势，如果真成了，这会非常有价值。

财务目标最具体，我将讨论一下我们希望开放 VR / AR 生态系统中的哪些方面，以及期望从哪些方面获得利润。

我们可以把生态系统分成三个主要部分：应用/体验，平台服务和 硬件/系统。在我的愿景里，VR/AR 将无处不在，这三者的重要程度依次排列（不过这不重要，苹果按照相反的顺序，成为了世界上最有价值的公司）

关键应用是你可以想到的：社交和媒体消费，尤其是沉浸式视频。游戏很关键，但更多是靠流行驱动，并且持续时间短，所以确保关键游戏能上我们平台，比拥有游戏更重要。我期待每个人都使用我们的社交通讯工具和媒体内容消费工具。如果我们在这些领域取得成功，将构建出很大的生意。为了在这些领域构建最好的服务，我们需要大笔投资和专门的战略。从现在来讲，我认为建立社交服务是我们的核心竞争力，这点我以后再详细说。

平台愿景围绕着很多 App 所使用的关键服务：身份，内容和虚拟化身市场，应用分发商店，广告，支付和其他社交功能。这些服务都有网络效应，稀缺性和变现潜力。使用我们的内容市场，应用商店和支付系统的开发者越多，他们就变得越好，我们就越容易赚钱。

有几点需要注意。首先这些平台服务应该是跨平台的。大部分服务可以在 iOS，安卓和桌面端中提供。在安卓上，我们可以建一个应用商店来为通过 Google Play 分发的这些 App 提供服务 - 如果是在我们的预装商店中购买，我们甚至不用给谷歌分成 30%。然后，这个平台的定义并不是技术语境下的操作系统（OS）。在现代操作系统中，大部分价值来自于 OS 供应商所提供的优质平台服务。我认为我们的主要平台策略不应该聚焦于构建独立OS，而是用于横跨所有系统的核心平台服务。这么做，会让 OS供应商试图把我们赶出去，但是如果我们提供卓越的服务并且提供 OS 所需的东西（比如 Unity 支持），那我们就很有机会取得成功。

生态系统的最后一部分是 硬件 / 系统。这里包括所有让 VR / AR 运转起来的核心科技，但是单独拎出来只有很少的可持续商业价值：头显，控制器，视觉追踪，底层 Linux ，图形接口。这里的每一块拼图都要非常好，才能打造整体的生态系统。比如，智能手机需要好的触控屏幕，电池管理，无线技术等。除了品牌，还要在专利壁垒和团队建设方面持续地遥遥领先对手，这是最难的部分。而且，即使公司已经成功了，也没有任何的单一硬件厂商能获得我们想要的 “无所不在” 的地位。

发展硬件和底层系统非常重要，有这么几个原因。它帮助我们加速和影响 VR / AR 的发展。这可以给我们一个 “把我们的平台服务嵌入到所有系统中（不仅仅是我们自己的）” 的重要机会。而且，如果我们持续地完成卓越的工作，它可以成为重要的营收驱动点，就像苹果一样。

我们的整体愿景是：我们的关键 App 无处不在，平台服务做到广泛覆盖（就像谷歌之于安卓），并且有足够强的硬件和系统，至少可以支撑起我们的平台服务，最好可以成为自己自足的业务。

为了达到这个愿景，我们需要做出很多不同的投资。在关键App 方面，我们还没有社交应用的项目，我们的视频业务也很薄弱。我们要快速启动这两个业务。在平台服务方面，我们已经开始在 Oculus 里面构建身份系统，应用商店和支付系统，但是我们已经落后 Valve 和 Google 好几年了，并且我们甚至还没开始虚拟化身和内容市场的工作。在硬件和系统方面，我们在VR头显，控制器和底层 SDK 方面有领先优势，但是我们并没有一个真正的开发/图像系统，而且我们在 AR 方面落后很多。

接下来的几年里，我们需要在应用，平台服务，开发/图形系统 和 AR 方面 进行新的投资。其中一些是收购，一些是自研。如果想着完全自研，我们会有耗时过长或者研发失败的风险，进而使我们的整体战略置于严重的风险之下。为了减少风险，我们应该从领先公司收购这些技术或产品。

基于我们自己的强项，我们将来在应用和平台服务方面，应该以内部自研为主，伺机收购为辅。在 VR / AR 和3D 核心技术这些我们没啥经验的领域，收购为主。所以 1> 我支持收购 Unity ，2> 期待今后几年收购一家 AR 公司，3> 伺机收购一些 VR app 的团队，4> 在平台服务方面持续加码内部投资。

一个重要的问题是：如果我们的战略是为了赢得关键 App 和平台服务，那我们为啥要在硬件和系统方面做如此大的投资？这个问题非常重要，尤其是当我们考虑在下一个十年里投资几十亿美元到 Unity 里的时候。为了展示拥有这项核心科技的价值，我提炼了几条拥有 Unity 后的优势：

首先，Unity 会帮助我们打造世界级的 VR / AR 体验，这是实现我们的使命所必须的。

加以时日，总有人需要紧密整合这个生态系统所需的所有软件和硬件 — 硬件端的头显，控制器和追踪；软件端的虚拟化身，内容和身份系统 — 对于大部分开发者来说，Unity 恰好处于整合这一切的合适位置。

如果我们拥有了 Unity，我们可以确保这一切的发生，快速发生，在我们的系统里发生。如果我们和 Unity 整合，Unreal 和其它厂商也会优先和我们合作来提供优秀的体验，我们就会推动整个市场向前。如果我们不拥有 Unity，那么最好的情况是我们可以激励他们优先为我们服务，并且所有的事情都会推进得更慢；最坏的情况是，其他人可能会收购它们并且彻底屏蔽掉我们。

某种意义上来说，拥有那些达成你的目标所需的核心科技非常重要。即使这些技术只是可能通往你的目标，拥有它增加了整合机会并降低了风险。

第二， Unity 会增加关键平台服务的使用，比如虚拟化身 / 内容市场和应用分发商店。我们可以把这些服务和 Unity 整合到一起，让它们优秀又易用。

举个“优秀”的例子，收购 Unity 之后，我们就可以确保我们的虚拟化身或者身份系统在 Unity 里整合得特别好，Unity 可以通过修改引擎的方式来支持我们，其他任何厂商打造的虚拟化身竞品都无法获得这种程度的支持。我们会保持 Unity 的承诺，也就是支持所有开发环境，但毫无疑问，拥有 Unity 将帮助我们高效地构建最好的关键服务。

举个“易用”的例子，由于我们拥有 Unity，我们的关键服务将永远稳定高速地运行。我们还可以把我们的关键服务作为开发者的默认选项。我们可以打造一条龙服务，从 Unity 开发到直接对接我们的应用商店，这样默认的虚拟化身和内容都将使用我们的商店格式。当然，如果我们的服务不优质，就无法确保上面的事情发生；但是如果我们的服务是优质的，那所有的开发者都能轻松使用到这些服务。

进而，由于我们的关键服务如此丝滑地整合进了 Unity，这会给其他引擎（比如 Unreal ）压力，迫使它们也深度整合我们的服务，来给开发者一样的易用体验。这将帮助我们达成目标，即扩散重要的平台服务，到那些不受我们控制的平台上。

触达更多的开发者 将给我们带来更多的机会，让我们的平台服务随着时间推移而嵌入得更深，带来更多的连带收入。就像那些深度依赖 Google Play 服务的开发者会倾向于使用更多的谷歌服务。开发者构建 VR / AR 体验时，使用我们的系统越多，就越倾向于使用更多来自我们的服务。

第三，Unity 能保证其他的平台型公司支持我们的平台服务。

如果我们拥有了 Unity，那么 Android，Windows 和 iOS 将需要我们去支持他们，否则它们生态系统中会有一大部分不能运转。我们当然不会直接拒绝，但我们可以选择支持的程度。

对于开放平台比如 Android 和 Windows， 这有助于平衡竞争环境并且确保我们可以持续提供我们的应用商店和其他关键服务。对于 iOS，苹果不会因此允许我们提供应用商店，但是它作为我们 VR / AR 战略的一部分，可以给我们其他重要筹码。

反过来说，如果其他人收购了 Unity 或者 生态系统里 其他核心科技组件的龙头公司，我们可能会有被彻底逐出市场的风险，如果这个收购者对我们有敌意，或者决定不支持我们的话。再强调一遍，虽然不太可能突然有一纸声明说 Unity 不再支持 Oculus，但是 Google 或者其他人永远不可能优先改善我们的集成。

某种程度上来说，这笔交易即使没有带来我们刚才所设想的好处，仅仅是避免刚才设想的最坏情况带来的风险，那这笔钱也值了。

回到开始的问题，Unity 和 其他核心科技是否值得我们在今后十年里花几十亿美元去投资？这个问题很难回答，我们不能绝对地说 如果我们做了某事，我们一定成功。生态系统需要很多块拼图，我们可能会在很多不同的方面遇到阻碍。我们现在知道的仅仅是，这件事能提升我们成功的概率。

为了在下一次计算浪潮中强化我们的地位，我认为我们要竭尽所能来提高成功概率。几十亿美元很贵，但是我们给得起。我们已经构建了我们的事业，现在可以为世界实现更伟大的使命，而这，是我能想到的，为未来做的最伟大的事情之一…