Yes, they have blown their shot at it by failing to launch a compelling product while the rest of the industry was not paying attention. The rest of the industry has had a few years to figure things out and whatever advantage they had five years ago, no longer exists or is greatly diminished.

I wouldn't count Meta as the victor though. So far, all we have is a lot of vapor ware and a lot of rumors about what Facebook Apple, Google, MS, etc. may or may not do. We'll likely get some new generation of goggles in the next few years but beyond that, I don't think there is much of a plan.

This smells a lot like the late nineties when the battle was on for who would own the best walled garden. We had Compuserve, AOL, Yahoo, and many other contenders. In the end none of those walled gardens survived and However, people instead pivoted to using the products of completely new companies (like Google).

I think we'll get a repeat of that and somebody will find a use for those shiny new goggles (beyond games and porn, the traditional accelerators of any new thing on the web). I don't think that's likely to come out of the corporate headquarters of big public companies.