Facebook bought Oculus and has spent the last five years killing what it was and reinventing it as a Facebook-scale company.
Mark Zuckerberg has poured billions into his virtual reality dream, a new platform that Facebook owns.
Facebook bought Oculus and has spent the last five years killing what it was and reinventing it as a Facebook-scale company. It has dumped most of the co-founders, brought in Zuck loyalists to take over the most important decisions and shifted towards accessibility over appeasing the company’s early supporters.
Facebook’s latest release is the realization of all that.
The company’s Quest product, which they released on Tuesday, offers a streamlined version of high-end virtual reality while leveraging time-honed software to make the process of getting up-and-running immeasurably easier. It’s probably the best VR product that’s been built yet, and one that has the mainstream firmly in view.
Facebook needs to lean in on the new device and move away from what got it there.
With past VR releases, there’s always been a key technology to blame or a key feature that was missing, but if the Oculus Quest fails, Facebook may just have to consider that the whole product category doesn’t hold the mass appeal it hoped for. Of more immediate concern should be why they’re maintaining such a differentiated product line in pursuit of the mainstream when the Quest is largely alone in appealing to the mainstream customer that they actually want.
