Facebook hopes that the hardware products developed by Building 8 will help the company enter the hardware field, but it turns out that Facebook does not have the capabilities that hardware development should have, and the company faces a series of privacy scandals, which eventually led to Facebook’s frustration in the hardware field.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “New Witness” (ID: AI_era), edit: Peng Fei.
Building No. 8, everything is still running as usual, but the dozens of employees working here always feel that there is a haze in the heart.
Suddenly, the ringing of the conference call rang, and everyone’s heart was tight at the same time. The meeting was held by their boss, Regina Dugan, vice president of Facebook.
This engineer and executive who has been in Silicon Valley for many years has also worked at Google for 4 years. Dugan also tried to harden his heart and announce a big news with a gesture that makes it easier for subordinates to accept.
But when she said that she would leave the team she had created, and gave up her once-speaking rhetoric and lofty ideals, the tears still flowed out.
The time passed back to April 2016, when Zuckerberg announced the launch of Dugan to lead the No. 8 building plan, he was so eager to participate. He has publicly announced that he will invest hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars in this plan in the next few years.
On October 17, 2017, Facebook’s mysterious 8th floor senior project lab, which was established in just one and a half years, is dying.
This doesn’t just mean that Facebook has saved hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars, and more importantly, it marks a major failure for Facebook to enter the hardware field. Looking around, Apple, Google, Amazon and even Microsoft have already stood by in the hardware arena.
In December 2018, the project was completely completed, and the only result was a video calling device. And this device, no one bought. 
The experience of Building 8 highlights Facebook’s core dilemma.
Now, Facebook’s revenue accounts for 93% of revenue. Hardware development takes longer, deeper horizons, and needs to be brokered with many manufacturers and distributors, and Facebook’s proud hacker culture has become incompatible with the reality of hardware development.
These issues go far beyond Facebook’s capabilities.
Today, we are standing outside and talking about the story that happened here.
Dugan, a visionary female leader
Regina Dugan, the protagonist of our story today, holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He has served as an executive at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and has a very high recognition in the hardware technology industry.
After joining Google, report directly to Sundar Pichai, then the product owner. When Google appointed Rick Osterloh, the former president of Motorola, as senior vice president in 2015, Dugan lost the opportunity to continue following Pichai.
And just as Facebook intends to enter the hardware industry, Zuckerberg extended an olive branch to her.
She came to Facebook with a big ambition. The first thing after getting to Facebook is to find the most promising seed projects on the team.
Kungfu pays off, so she found a prototype codenamed Little Foot, an iPad mounted on a motorized base that detects people in the room and rotates in that direction.
Zuckerberg’s bet video equipment, Building 8 decided to use Little Foot as the basis for consumer video calling equipment, creating a huge video device that was covered with a wall. The team worked with award-winning photographer and documentary filmmaker Lucian Perkins to develop a feature that keeps the camera locked into the speakers in the video frame.
At the end of 2016, the team launched the prototype and went to Facebook CTO Mike Sc
Bosworth has been hiring from ATAP to follow Dugan’s Rafa Camargo as interim head.
Finally, in November, Facebook released two video chat devices, and added a lens cover to shield the lens when not in use.
But the user no longer trusts Facebook, and Facebook has to admit that because the chat software is based on Facebook’s Messenger, it collects the same type of data and may be used for precision advertising.
A month later, Camargo announced that Building 8 no longer exists.
In early 2018, the remaining research projects were transferred to Oculus Research, which has been renamed Facebook Reality Labs, based in Redmond, Washington, to explore wearable brain-computer interface devices.