Social media giant Facebook, in an attempt to free itself from being dependent on other tech giants like Google, has reportedly started development of its own operating system. The development was first reported by The Information.
This means that in the future, hardware products from Facebook, which includes the likes of Oculus and Portal, could come running the company home-developed operating system, the report says citing Facebook executive Ficus Kirkpatrick.
According to the report, the operating system from Facebook, the name of which remains unknown, will be built from scratch. The project is being led by Mark Lucovsky, a former Microsoft engineer who co-authored the Windows NT operating system.
Its noteworthy that social media giant Facebook has not indicated when the said operating system (OS) might arrive or which products would use it first. This isn’t the first time Facebook has considered developing its own OS. Facebook once developed prototypes of a custom OS for Home, but ultimately decided to go ahead with Android.
It seems that the current version of the operating system that Facebook is working on is a part of the company’s larger effort to make itself self sufficient and reduce reliance on other companies.
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Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s head of augmented and virtual reality, told The Information: “We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us,” “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”
Along with its own operating system, Facebook is also developing a voice assistant similar to Apple‘s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. The company even approached Microsoft to license data from its Bing search engine to train the assistant.
The development of all these software products to power its hardwares will take place in Facebook’s new 770,000-square-foot campus being built in Burlingame, California, where the company is also developing other products, including AR Glasses.
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(Source)
