If Facebook had quietly (and they were for the longest time!) continued to work on Oculus and done some internal skunkworks projects, instead of a big PR push and a company rename, maybe they could pull an iPhone.

Personally, I think they drank the meta verse koolaid to get everyone to stop talking about election interference and other things that were being blamed on them, and I think it mostly worked.

What examples are you thinking of? Did this happen with the PC or smartphone?

- The "public" Internet, although since I used the word "deviant" people might not like me giving it as an example.

- Social media in general, which again not necessarily deviant, but before it reached critical mass a lot of people just found it weird and privacy invasive. I distinctly remember my family making fun of people posting their thoughts on early Twitter.

- eCommerce, was considered strange as you would put your CC information on some random website.

- Video games were for nerds and losers, now most people have an Xbox/Playstation.

- Drone/RC plane community was much more weird before the likes of DJI which lowered the bar significantly.

- More recently remote work was usually for a small portion of workers and people commonly said you had to be a certain type of person for it to work at all. Fast forward a pandemic and remote meetings are common and even requested by would-be employees.

I feel like there a fallacy somewhere in my arguments for sure, but there definitely seems to be a trend where things are weird, dumb and strange until they just aren't by reaching critical mass. Strapping a screen to your face to play video games and chat with people is definitely one of those until it isn't and I'd bet that within 10 years it will be already much more common.