There are literally thousands of these machines at each office.

Maintaining a fleet of android devices sucks hard, especially when they are on devices that are not really designed to be remotely controlled (any kind of tablet is really not that well designed to be managed remotely (ie has batteries, only works on wifi, not onboard TPM thats useful))

Plus they are posted in every room where sensitive conversations are going on, not only that there is a list of who's going to be in those meetings. Not only that, they have access to video conferencing in each room as well.

Combine that with the portal offering, I can see the compelling value add.

as for "not a hardware company" their datacentres are almost entirely custom.

Not a hardware company yet. There was a time where Amazon and Google were not hardware companies.

But I think saying they are not a hardware company is a bit unfair. Oculus by itself is a tremendously hard and complex hardware business. Portal less so, but it’s still a meaningful device with a lot of complexity.

Also Facebook infrastructure must have hundreds of proprietary hardware elements that are built specifically for their own use cases.

But I get what you’re saying. From all the tech behemoths, FB is the by far the least experienced in hardware. But I think it’s pretty clear that FB sees hardware as a column of their long term vision. That alone is enough reason to invest on developing your own hardware.

How about just as an exercise in actually having fun? I'm sure there are several qualified hardware engineers at Facebook and the company has plenty of money. All of the off-the-shelf solutions to this problem are complete garbage, so they just decided to make a better one. For fun.

Not a hardware company? Haven’t they been making their own DC power servers and high end SDN gear for a half dozen years now?

Facebook started building their own hardware prior to 2011 (when they open sourced their designs): https://about.fb.com/news/2011/04/facebook-launches-open-com...

But they are big enough that most hardware companies would be small-scale operations in comparison. Why wouldn't they set up a division to do something like this?

There's some projection-psychodrama to it, but it goes along with the tape on Zuckerberg's webcam: they really don't want Google, Amazon, or their Chinese competitors on their corporate network, especially not with cameras and microphones.