That's supposing Facebook knows how to scale production of electronic items... apart from the cash, they have no relevant experience about that. If it had been Google or Microsoft there would already be people who know how to make it scale to mass production.

Think of it as similar to the scaling challenges of MMORPGs. Only much worse.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/448631430533246976

EDIT: By "giant MMO" I mean "metaverse from Snowcrash," not "video game."

I don't know exactly what Oculus's plan was but it'd be foolish to ignore this obvious application, and that certainly seems to be where Mark Zuckerberg sees the value in it, if we are to take his speech on the conference call at face value.

Zuck probably has some tricks up his sleeve to accomplish this goal. And he's been able to learn from G+ about how not to go about it.

Whether the Metaverse is cool will make or break its popularity. It's what made Facebook's.

The coming years are going to be pretty interesting.

Since when was OculusVR supposed to build the metaverse? I thought they only wanted to build the tools to access it.

Facebook-type users are a decade or more away from VR. They don't "do" fiddly interfaces and rough edges. Even if the hardware was there, the usability isn't.

In both cases there are potentially large payoffs in the long term. But they're extremely high price tags for decade-plus plays in which the acquired company has little to no particular proprietary technological edge.

Now, that old LAMP Apache+mpm_worker setup, that one was bad.

They have a lot of XP in building real physical shit these days.

Scaling traffic is a non-issue for them.

Also worth noting, the head of OCP left Facebook today. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2111680/open-compute-project-...

My point is that they are not strangers to manufacturing tech...

Facebook phone, anyone?

There's a world of difference between a potential item, like the FB phone and an actual, demonstrated item, like the Oculus Rift, so they might get some points there.

But their record ATM is non-existent, AFAIK.

Well I have worked in companies making physical goods (shipping millions every year), and you just don't buy a team from one day to another. It's not just about production, it's about supply chain, it's about quality management and quality assurance, regulations for sale in different countries/states, market research, product qualification to improve the design, actual customer support, vendors, distribution, etc...

It's a whole new area of skills/functions you don't have, and that does not mix very well with a software-only company mentality. I think it's going to be very tough for them to make something solid with Facebook.

EDIT: They would have been better prepared for scaling with a company like Apple (whose main business is already making hardware), Microsoft or Google for that matter. Many people say Valve could have been a good choice, but Valve has said several times they don't want to go into the hardware business (and won't make Steam boxes themselves).

The point is that, while Facebook may be able to do hardware, servers is not a good example.

Disclosure: my team at Sanmina has been responsible for delivering the test automation & integration software for the rack assembly & test operation for Facebook.

For that matter, Google itself doesn't build anything at scale, either. Why would they? They outsource all their high-vol manufacturing to the same EMS companies everyone else uses (Quanta, Compal, Foxconn, Flextronics, Sanmina, Celestica, Jabil, Pegatron, Benchmark, Plexus and a handful of others).

Made in China, as far as I can find out. They don't make hardware any more than Apple does.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power-play/

If you're gonna spend $2B to buy something you want, better if you can get someone else to foot the bill.

It's the investors who will get a lot of Facebook's money. Also, Facebook's stock dropped yesterday in reaction to the move and it's being reported that the deal is worth $200 million less as a result. [3]

The B round investors held it for such a short time it's almost like they flipped it to Facebook.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift

[2] http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/12/oculus-vr-raises-75m-from-...

[3] http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/03/26/facebook-sha...

This is not a "deal". Facebook will own the company and can (rightfully) be expected to do whatever they want with it.

I have the DK1, and I ordered the DK2 not even a week ago, I've been active in tinkering with Oculus for a while now and even did some Twitch.tv casts of BF3, DayZ, etc. and other games running through TriDef or VorpX. I'm about to start working on a project allowing MS Kinect usage to be broadcast in an Oculus compatible format for web consumption by Oculus users. So I'm pretty "in touch" with the tech at this point.

I see this move as FB ensuring a healthy portfolio and healthy future stock price for their investors by getting the jump on patents and technology of a sure fire success emerging market. I don't think you'll have 3D oculus web cam video calls or friend requests popping up in your flight sim, that's just rampant and misguided speculation.

If I had a choice about WHO bought Oculus the top of the list would be Valve. They already have Carmack, having Newell in the mix would be amazing and ensure the tech was in good hands. Facebook or Google would be next in line, and waaaaay down at the bottom of the list would be Sony, Microsoft, or EA (I would burn the hardware and pretend it never existed if EA bought it).

tl;dr The entire community is acting like a bunch of idiots, stop it, you're embarrassing yourselves and showing your business management ignorance. If I was a company that made it big in the social boom and IPO'd but was facing a shrinking userbase on my life blood product, you better bet your ass I'd utilize my resources to diversify my business. Keeping your all your eggs in a single basket is a historically bad idea.

edit: also based on these comments people think Oculus offers software... they don't, you don't play an Oculus VR MMORPG... they provide hardware and an SDK, everything else is up to content producers, the scaling crisis would be purely one of hardware manufacturing and distribution and maintaining a very widely used SDK. Which I would consider FB pretty okay at... I won't say good... but okay will suffice, especially considering backwards compatibility for hardware/software of this type isn't a big concern.

Calling anyone who disagrees with you an idiot and an embarrassment isn't good.

The central issue is that when Facebook begins to lose relevance, Zuck is going to yank the reins on Oculus as hard as possible to ensure Facebook stays relevant. You can see how Google did this with G+/YouTube integration.

VR is in its nascent stages, and Oculus has been synonymous with VR. Now instead of VR having a strong an independent company with Carmack near the helm, "VR" is a subservient division of Facebook.

Whether that turns out to be a good thing, well, time will tell. But to call people "ignorant idiots" for being worried is a little extreme, to say the least.

EDIT: You're also mistaken about this part (as I was):

also based on these comments people think Oculus offers software... they don't, you don't play an Oculus VR MMORPG... they provide hardware and an SDK, everything else is up to content producers, the scaling crisis would be purely one of hardware manufacturing and distribution and maintaining a very widely used SDK

The scaling crisis is software, not hardware. They appear to be planning some kind of Oculus VR MMO based on Carmack's tweets. See here for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7471231

This is exactly what comes to mind. Seeing how Google transformed post Eric Schmidt, makes me consider that even IF Zuck has absolutely all the good intentions of letting Oculus do its own thing, CEOs change, and corporations tend to get worse as they grow older (IMO), for some reason.

It could be all good, Oculus could be a great hit, a wonderful platform, all that everyone hopes. Then comes a new CEO with a grand U-turn vision, pulls the rug from beneath their feet and absoluty sinks the ship.

There's just no security, if Oculus kept control, than great, the company is the product, it depends on it to carry on. But Facebook just has the product, its just a leverage, second grade citizen within the corp.

I can't help but feel that is the same over-dramatization that people are having with Facebook buying Oculus. People like to think that EA is the devil, but in reality they are a game company and has plenty of resources including very smart people that could assist in bringing Oculus to market at least as well as Facebook.

- Origin requirements

- Online requirements

- SimCity debacle

- buggy release after buggy release

- customer support is... turrible

I could go on and on, I don't even buy their stuff anymore, BF3 is and was the last of their games I plan on owning.

A question: does Facebook need to only be facebook.com?

After all, there are plenty of examples in other industries of companies doing unrelated things and making a go of it. Consider Hitachi TVs and heavy equipment.

Facebook could launch Facebook Games to coincide with Oculus' consumer launch, providing a Steam-like service to pick up and play VR games, day one. Integration from this standpoint could be as innocuous as "Log in with your Facebook account" along side "Log in with your Google account" or "create an account".

ah.. 1 minute? I thought there was 1 month old tweet that mentioned FB (and obviously overlooked)

It happens so often many of us just laugh if not smirk the whole time we watch the familiar process play itself out. Eventually they learn they are not the center of the universe.

Or, yeah, angst.

The core services sure but why wouldn't it be like FB in general(full of third party apps and games)?

There's a reason people only integrate with FB to try and take traffic, and even then they become the customer paying for ads. It's not worth your time.

In any case, if making awesome VR a reality was Oculus' vision, they can make a pretty good case for that vision being well served by the resources of Facebook.

At the end of the day, what are people afraid of? That the newest action games won't be playable on Rift? I just don't see how people figure Facebook might ruin this product.

That said, I personally don't know if Facebook is going to mess up Oculus. I imagine that what people are worried about is that Facebook will push for Oculus to be used for social VR and will largely ignore games. VR gaming requires high quality sensory experience in a dynamic environment with fast player movements. Social VR is probably going to be way, way more static, (but will have other demands like monitoring body position, face scanning, etc.)

To make the product valuable, it has to be a good platform which other companies can use.

Facebook has ruined many companies that relied on the facebook api to build their businesses. Sometimes facebook reimplemented someones else idea and then remove features from the api to kill the original company.

Making a product based on the Oculus rift platform is a high risk operation. Facebook has already ruined the trust.