Why?

What benefit is there to grabbing market share from your competitors... in a business you don't even want to be in?

By that logic you could justify any bizarre business decision. Should Google launch a social network, to hurt their competitor Facebook? Should Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft each launch a phone?

>Should Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft each launch a phone?

* https://www.lifewire.com/whatever-happened-to-the-facebook-p...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Phone

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone

> Should Google launch a social network, to hurt their competitor Facebook?

I mean, Google did launch a social network, to hurt their competitor Facebook. It was a whole thing. It was even a really nice system, eventually.

I enjoyed using Google plus more than any other social network, and managed to create new connections and/or have standard, authentic, real conversations with people I didn't know, most of them ordinary people with shared interests that I would probably wouldn't meet otherwise, some of them are people I can't believe I could connect with directly in any other way - newspapers and news sites editors, major SDK developers. And even with Kevin Kelly.

And it turned out that Facebook had quite a moat with network effects. OpenAI doesn’t have such a moat, which may be what Meta is wanting to expose.

Google botched the launch, and they never nurture products after launch anyway. Google+ could have been more successful.

Who says they don't want to be in the market? Facebook has one product. Their income is entirely determined by ads on social media. That's a perilous position subject to being disrupted. Meta desperately wants to diversify its product offerings - that's why they've been throwing so much at VR.