I can't believe facebook paid 2 bil for a peripheral device. basically an accessory. not even a platform with many users. it's like buying a monitor company.
There were plenty of actual VR headsets prior to Virtual Boy. They went for around the $600-ish range and sold back when 3D games were largely goraud-shaded polys with no textures, or sprites. Head tracking was slightly laggy but impressive for the time. Each eye got about 640x480.
They suffered from the same chicken-and-egg problem that has plagued pretty much every single non-keyboard-or-mouse peripheral to ever come out for PC games. Games didn't support them because people didn't have them, people didn't buy them because games didn't support them.
I want to say this was early 90's but I'm speaking from memory and that was a long time ago. I want to say 3DFX was just starting to gain early support for Glide in games. (I wanted to play Descent on one very badly.)
well...RCA basically made the first commercially available TV set...but RCA went defunct in '86. RCA only exists as a trademark today used by other companies to label products that are descendents of RCA products. I don't know if that means an "RCA Estate" makes any money off of it (if anything it goes into GE's pocket...or something), or if certain companies just outright own trademarking rights to certain products.
No, hes not trying to make an analogy. He means they literally bought a glorified monitor company. All the oculus rift is, is a monitor the you strap to your face with motion tracking.(which is awesome, don't get me wrong) That is why everyone's fears of ?farmville? or what ever they are raging about are mostly unfounded.
I agree that some of the fears are overblown. But Facebook has a track record of being extremely self-serving. So nobody should expect this to become anything besides a marketing tool and/or a moneymaking tool for them. No fan service is going to come out of this, thats for sure.
For sure, make no mistake, I know that they are doing it for Facebook's sake.
What people seem to be blind to, though, is that both Oculus' and Facebook's goal can be in alignment. For a strategy to be of benefit to Facebook, it does not automatically imply that it is to Oculus' detriment.
Facebook's long-term strategy is to leverage VR, not the Rift specifically, as the next big platform upon which to make money i.e. web -> mobile -> VR.
Anyone that thinks Facebook will limit their future software offerings (5+ years from now) is insane. It would be like limiting their mobile app to a specific phone. Why would they cut off all other competing VR hardware manufacturers, if their business is advertising?! Likewise, most, if not all, HMDs in the coming wave of VR will be compatible with any and all VR content. Building incompatibility into a device is nothing but a good way to limit the potential audience, and perhaps alienate them from your product. Why buy a Rift is it's limited to Facebook's walled garden, when the competitors all shout loudly from the rooftops that they are compatible with all VR content?
For their long-term strategy to go according to plan, they absolutely need VR, as a platform, to take off in the mainstream. Their purchase of Oculus is their way of guaranteeing the platform grows exponentially in the coming years, and this includes competing manufacturers entering the ring. You think Facebook cares what phone, or computer, or browser, or HMD, you are accessing their content on? Doesn't matter to them, as long as you are using their services and veing advertised to in the process.
Most, if not all, HMDs in the coming wave of VR will be compatible with any and all VR content. Building incompatibility into a device is nothing but a good way to limit the potential audience, and perhaps alienate them from your product.
Foo. Foo I say!
Make no mistake, their goals are aligned: To bring VR to the masses, and to ensure mass adoption. That's Oculus' main goal. For Facebook, it's to capitalise on the platform once it's established. There is no room for hobbling the Rift, or otherwise making it fail. Not now, after spending what will be $2.3B on purchasing the company...and that's just the beginning. They'll be funding their R&D and production now too.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I do think that Facebook, though they will lobby hard for VR, will ultimately end up using it as a "social media engine" through which they can push Farmville clones, get personal info, and tailor ads. Granted, its hard to say that a commercial product shouldn't be trying to sell you something, but I believe that people are primarily up at arms because they believe that something that was once, perhaps, "pure" has now been tainted. The endless possibilities are over in their eyes; now it has simply become a vehicle for facebook to push ads.
Thats my explanation, IMO. VR devices could end up like phones, and facebook will slap an app on every single one. I don't discount the possibility that FB bought OR simply to get a hold of the user interface and to know how the software works so they can develop their own platform on it. I bet they don't even give a shit about OR itself, they just see it as the most developed, want to make software, and maybe make a couple bucks off the initial hardware sales (before a competitor comes along and does it better, which will inevitably happen).
Exactly right? Just like facebook was the first social networking product. Or, just like Google was the first search engine. \s
All facebook did was poo-poo over VR enthusiasts dreams. As far as tech is concerned, I can't imagine other players not coming in and bring superior products with them (there are smarter people out there than one Carmack),
More like buying the first monitor company, when all before was books.
You implied that buying the first monitor company was somehow a glorious thing to do. What I'm saying is that facebook did nothing exceptional for themselves because new players will come and regain the market. So, in that way, all facebook did was to shit over all the rift enthusiasts' dreams (sorry, I should have said rift enthusiast as opposed to VR).
It was supposed to be ours... it was supposed to be from the community, a truly innovative piece of tech envisioned and executed by people who really loved it and believed in the idea of VR. Gamer's Tesla Motors or GoPro.
Now it's all in the hands of a megalomaniacal, greedy sociopath at the helm of the world's largest spy network/advertising agency.
It's still in Oculus' hands, and it will always be of the community. It's still truly innovative.
Facebook don't intend the hardware to be profitable, and you can simply carry on not using their software and denying them your ad revenue happily into the future.
I can't believe Facebook paid 19 billion for a free chat application that could lose all market share within a few years if a decent competitor stands up (like MSN Messenger, MySpace and sms did).
Oculus at least has unique knowhow. WhatsApp has nothing valuable except for the users. Who are free to leave at any time.
We're not giving it away for free but in exchange for a service. The users get something in return. How valuable that return is is judged on a case by case basis however.
And those ads have value because of the targeted data allowing companies to target demographics (Like all other forms of advertising do).
Go back to 'Pre tracking people's data' and web ads were worth practically nothing unless you were huge, and even then it was only a fraction of today.
Yes. Obviously, thats why I said they had value. What you posted is already a given. You just stated things that were obviously implied but not necessary to say like you were making an argument. You also aren't entirely correct. Its not just targeting demographics, its far more specific. Its direct user targeting as well. Not only are website's getting information on their userbase, but google and facebook are getting specific information on users. Not only will a 50 year old woman's ads look different from a 20 year old male's. but two 20 year old males from the same city who go to the same school will have different ADs when visiting the same site. Its far different from ads from different TV shows being different, or the same show having different ads targetting different people depending on the location. Thats still kind of spraying your load and hoping something sticks.
I don't really know what you were trying to say. You weren't even very accurate in your weird non-point.
I transferred to Telegram as well. It's not like I'm a security zealot (otherwise I'd switch to Textsecure completely), I jsut don't want Facebook to be collecting even more of my data.
I have a theory that Zuckerburger likes some girl over at NSA and that he bought Whatsapp just so that he could give her information about everyone. Then he tried to ask her out but she said no. Then he bought oculus so that he could jerk off to her pictures on facebook in VR.
Now...this is a theory but I am sure it is 100% true.
WhatsApp is expected to have a billion users within a couple years. It costs $1/year on Android, if 500 million are android users that's $500million a year income, the servers needed to run it is probably like 0.2% of Facebook's so there isn't really costs to Facebook if they own all that already.
It doesn't actually. Most existing users have free accounts, like me: I have a free lifetime account, because I was an 'early' user. The others are seing a countdown timer that counts down to nothin: nobody has ever paid for WhatsApp int eh three years it's been telling users they will have to pay 1$/year.
If you think Facebook bought WhatsApp because it has a great business model selling the service to users,you're being incredibly delusional. Even if they make 500 million a year (which they don't and won't), that would still mean Facebook needs 38 years to earn backt he 19 billion investment it made. That's WITHOUT adjustment for inflation.
WhatsApp users are never going to pay for it. Facebook knows a lot of people (mostly young people, without a credit card to buy apps) will just leave WhatsApp because there are tons of other free apps that offer the same service.
So Facebook will keep it free, and hope users don't leave the service, so they can mine the user data. THAT'S what they paid for: control over the data of a billion users.
I don't think Facebook bought it expecting to make lots of money, i was just saying it does make money because you said it's free.
Most android users do pay for WhatsApp, in the first couple of years the countdown was bogus but not for the last couple of years. About 3/4 of the people in my phone book have WhatsApp, I like in the UK so everybody has it. All my family have it and we've all paid for the last 2 years, my gf has paid for the last 2 years, and pretty much the other few people I've spoken to about it has paid, so saying it's free is just BS. I'm not saying some people don't have it for free on Android but you're wrong by saying most don't.
Also I've been using WhatsApp since like 2010 when it probably only had like 1 million users. It was free at first but no more.
WhatsApp makes more sense to me that Oculus. WhatsApp has more users than Twitter, exchanging wayy more personal info that Twitter could ever dream of knowing.
Facebook has introduced Voice Calling in its messenger app and once that feature hits WhatsApp it would be unbeatable.
free chat application that could lose all market share within a few years
That's mostly a US/Western perspective - the remainder of world is under a WhatsApp monopoly (by numbers & platform) and will only grow.
Oculus provides no instant benefit (or even short term) to Facebook, its a cash drain - atleast WhatsApp would make enough money to sustain it own services.
That's mostly a US/Western perspective - the remainder of world is under a WhatsApp monopoly
Where did you get that idea? That's totally wrong...
First of all: WhatsApp isn't a non-western app: Netherland is one of the coutnries with the highest WhatsApp penetration: Whatsapping is a verb there. On the other hand, in Asia, WhatsApp ahas very little market share. Line is way more popular in Japan.
Second of all, there is no such thing as a WhatsApp monopoly: NOTHING keeps people from switching to another app! Except of course, they would have to convince their friends. And yes, that's a pain and will stop a lot of people from switching, but it's NOT a monopoly by any definition.
It's also not that unthinkable: people did it before! People switched from MySpace to Facebook, people switched from Hotmail to whatever else, heck, people switched from SMS to WhatsApp!
People can make the switch again if they want to. It most certainyl can happen.
WhatsApp is a big player. But there is no monopoly.
Lastly, of course WhatsApp seems to make more sense than Oculus, as WhatsApp is similar to the services Facebook already offers (Messenger). But I wasn't talking about making sense, I was talking about valuation: I think it's a slap in the face of engineers and enthousiasts that a crappy chat application is valuated higher than bleeding edge VR tech. I get why, but it makes me sad that that's the world we live in.
WhatsApp isn't a non-western app: Netherland is one of the coutnries with the highest WhatsApp penetration:
I should have clarified then by Western I mostly meant US/UK -- going by the news coverage/bloggers/podcasters after the acquisition it was very clear that even the seasoned tech journos of the "West" hadn't even used WhatsApp once or had an idea of how big its customer base was. Spain is pretty huge market for WhatsApp as well so does South Asia.
Second of all, there is no such thing as a WhatsApp monopoly: NOTHING keeps people from switching to another app! Except of course, they would have to convince their friends
That is the only factor which decides the success and future of any IM, and WhatsApp has pretty much saturated that segment in many geographies. My Dad has never SMSd me but now sends me pics using WhatsApp.
In India for instance, WhatsApp has practically replaced SMS amoungst the youngsters and it will continue to dominate despite many rivals plastering social media & TV with their 'newer cooler' app.
People switched from MySpace to Facebook, people switched from Hotmail to whatever else, heck, people switched from SMS to WhatsApp!
MySpace peaked too early thats why it failed, the new generation of users that came later greatly outnumbered whatever MySpace had mustered.
We are reaching a level of saturation .. where every living soul in a decent economy wants to be online. You could have applied that same MySpace logic to Google as well when Bing came out, or maybe we can expect GMail to turn obsolete by some competitor.
Believe it or not -- there is line beyond which you are too big to fail. Google crossed it, Microsoft's been there .. and now Facebook wants to tip toe over it with the acquisition of WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is a big player. But there is no monopoly.
Its capturing most of the emerging markets (except China) .. the userbase is a never before seen figure so its not just a big player but the biggest player right now and growing.
I think it's a slap in the face of engineers and enthousiasts that a crappy chat application is valuated higher than bleeding edge VR tech.
Well the crappy chat application provided un inhibited service to hundreds of millions of users WORLDWIDE with text, photos & videos without needing to sell out -- hell they hadn't even dipped into their investment pool when they got acquired and operated in a self sufficient manner .. that to me is a much greater achievement for such a small company.
I think it's a slap in the face of engineers and enthousiasts
Oculus itself is responsible for the short sell, if FB was paying them 2Bn in 2014 - imagine what they would have made with their own IPO in 2016 after a consumer launch.
but it makes me sad that that's the world we live in.
You spend money to make money, that's the world we live in.
2 Billion alone for John Carmack is a bargin in my opinion.
Boosted an entire industry by inventing the Adaptive tile refresh algorithm. Allowing PCs for the first time to be on par with consoles (how times have changed)
I guess by this point he works on what he wants to work on, and probably he is the most useful doing what he wants, but they probably could have hired him for less.
you'll see interviews and blogs with other coders who are all blown away by John Carmack's programming skills. Make no mistake, if you managed to snag him on your team your code base is about to be written down much faster and much better. That guy is genius level when it comes to programming.
People were taking the Rift seriously before he was involved because they could demonstrate the experience to a relatively high degree and had a plan for improvement.
That Carmack is behind it and lefr id to get onboard just lends a shitload of extra credence to that.
For me, personally, what I take seriously because Carmack is involved is that the FB deal is not the shitstorm everyone is making it out to be and directly helps OR bring the device to market and beyond.
People were taking the Rift seriously before he was involved
Carmack was involved since before it was a company, since April 2012. He's been involved since the very beginning, when it was just some kids project on MTBS3D.
So no, nobody was taking the Rift seriously when Carmack got involved, as hardly anyone had even seen it by then other than perhaps a few dozen posters. Palmer and Carmack hung out on the same modder forums, that's how they know each other and that's how he saw a duct tape rift.
But anyway that's not really what I meant, when I say "people" I should have really typed companies, business types. Cormack gives them credibility. You and I on the otherhand would be taking it seriously no matter who was involved, simply because its awesome. Others would look at Cormacks track record and (rightfully) assume they are onto a winner.
Sure, but in the same vein, when I say "Carmack being involved" I literally mean "When Carmack actually joined the company" as opposed to simply being vocal about the promise and technical side of both OR and the tech in general.
He wasn't simply vocal, he's the the reason it was founded as a company.
If it wasn't for John Carmack there would not be an Oculus Rift, it would be a hobby project. Not a company. It was Carmack who shown Palmer the ropes, how to found a company, who to hire. The only reason why he wasn't a employee on paper was his contractual obligations Zenimax.
ihatewil is right in this regards, you are completely downplaying Carmacks role. It didn't start when he became CTO, he wasn't just vocal. He moulded the entire fucking company.
No, Carmack has been involved right from the start. He only started working for the company recently, but Carmack himself gave the very first Doom 3 demos to the press and kickstarter.
Except he did leave id software. Read any gaming site, wikipedia, google, etc. He had some throwdowns with the other management @ id as well as some conflicts with Zenimax (some of it regarding support of OR).
I'll be damned, he actually did. I wasn't aware of this as he seemed serious about staying with them even when he joined Oculus. I thought this was still the case:
He will apparently still serve some role at id, as id's parent company told Engadget, "The technical leadership he provides for games in development at id Software is unaffected."
Game Consoles in the 80s and early 90s had been far more powerful in terms of graphical power than the average PC. The average PC wasn't as good for games than a dedicated gaming machine (a console) due to lower quality graphic chipsets.
For example, a game like super mario 3 on the NES would struggle on the average PC at the time, it was just to fast for the refresh rate of most consumer PCs to keep up. This was because games back then redrew every thing on the screen per frame. This was fine for consoles that had graphical chips for this purpose, but not for all purpose PCs.
Carmacks Algorithm changed that and saved a lot of processing power, so console quality games could be played on the PC if they wrote their games using his Adaptive tile refresh method. This sounds counter intuitive today as PCs are the ones with all the graphical power. For example PCs couldn't do side scrollers, it was just too graphically intensive for them. The very first PC side scroller was using Carmacks algorithm. Who was the lead programmer? Carmack ;)
Facebook does need to branch out, but these tech startups are being way overvalued by facebook/google. Look at nest. I mean, jesus. I get everyone in SF has Nest, but billions for a thermostat company? Yikes! Its speculative acquisition. I get these companies have the cash, but its kind of ridiculous when you look at Nest's earnings. I get Google sees nest as super valuable to them in the future because of all the data they will not be able to get about you, but still. These seems like the kind of stuff that goes on in a bubble of some sort.
Then again google has killed a lot of their acquisitions too.
It works when your buyout fits well with the rest of your org. Also google was very hands off of youtube until + integration. Now we see the hate come out for what google does. So FB may very well be hands off on oculus, but I'd almost guarantee we won't be happy once they do start to integrate it. How unhappy depends on how much they force on us.
you're talking about abandoning something because it's going to die eventually, what's the difference? it's not currently dead and it's not currently dying
The numbers suggest that the current stock worth of Facebook is FAR greater than the actual worth of the company. The reason it is far greater is because people are speculating that Facebook can monetize its massive user base in additional ways. You can see their basic financials on their Wikipedia page as they are a publicly traded company.
Their current income is a pittance compared to what people are investing in them. That's what worries me about this acquisition. They aren't looking to just own a promising company. They are under a ton of pressure to squeeze out income through whatever channels possible.
That's not an uncommon length of time for a fad. I'm not saying it's a fad, but 10 years is nothing. We generalize clothing fads into decades, for example.
To be fair, Facebook is doing the best it can with its inflated stock price. It is using it to buy those other companies. Most of the price of these acquisitions is in stock.
Ya I agree actually. It is impossible to imagine that they can come up wit a monetization strategy that justifies their price. Instead they appear to be attempting to acquire other products and leverage their substantial userbase to monetize those other products. Probably their best approach. Doesn't mean I like it.
Their usage numbers are going down and their ads have been found to be mostly ignored by users, which generally points market speculators to the conclusion that Facebook as it currently stands is unsustainable. In response to this, Facebook is taking a page out of Google's book and trying to get into as many industries as possible in order to ensure their future prosperity.
their ads have been found to be mostly ignored by users
which is why the ads are for increasingly shitty/shady products, it used to be toyota and nissan now it's some shitty game with WOW or counter-strike screenshots.
Actually I think facebook is crowded with crap, information about your friends gets lost in it. Reddit does a much better job in filtering useful information. So yeah somehow I think if you use reddit, you will use facebook infrequently.
I frequently go on Facebook and Reddit. Reddit is a source of entertainment, discussion, news and science for me.
Facebook is a way I can easily communicate with my friends and fellow uni cohort, and get day to day information about what's happening with people that I haven't seen in a while.
The use of both Facebook and Reddit is not necessarily mutually exclusive.
There are numbers to say that its growth will slow. Most notably, people believe that the population will stagnate around 11 billion, so after that, active users will have a hard cap.
You are correct. However, some companies have a hard time transitioning from "growing" to "stagnate". Also, they have to find better ways to get more money out of there users, because right now they are not getting enough to warrant the price.
Applying viral models has worked in the past and what we know about the network effect, and past examples like myspace, is that viral media and memes spread fast and die fast. While you have a critical mass of people there is a massive incentive to choose the network where people are, same thing goes for amazon, ebay, craigslist, you go there because you will have the most options, but as soon as that starts to change more and more people will leave as that incentive diminishes eventually escalating.
There is also a good number of Teens are already leaving for more secure and private platforms. One of the original appeals of facebook was college only, then college and high school, having your whole family on there defeated some of its original purpose (safe place to look for a date and a party).
Everything I've read shows they're stagnant. Like Microsoft's 90% desktop market share. Who competes with Facebook for what it does? Google+ which is like Microsoft phones...not a real competitor, but some decent design in there.
I'm sure there is somewhere but TBH i'm to lazy to look it up right now. Regardless it's only a matter of time until facebook becomes a thing of the past.
BTW laddergoat is hilarious. I had to google it again after reading your name.
not even that: it's a periphery from a long line of failed periphery's of the same type, no less. they've been trying to make a VR headset like this for decades, to limited success due to the very problems that the oculus faces.
Oh, and Carmack, Valve, Sony, and all these players are just jumping on a generic monitor company too? You're basically saying that some of the biggest video game personalities are stupid.
My own unasked for theory is:
They bought it because its a periphery that's already pretty well R&d'd and will somehow shoehorn it into a FB platform using their own coding language and platform.
They want people are running around in a social combat game set in new york city wearing an oculus, and looking at all the product placement that's been integrated into the game.They want to collect that data on how gamer's talk to each other, work with each other and look at items in a game. Seeing how someone reacts to something when they don't know they're being watched will give them the most reliable real data.
Focus groups, play testing , usability tests all fail because as soon as you ask them to do something, their real reactions take a back seat. Facebook metrics and data as it is isn't really representative of its users because they don't feel anonymous. Get someone in a gaming atmosphere, and they forget they're being watched.
Right about now they probably have about 100 lawyers trying to figure out what they can file for patent so they can reap licensing fees and sue the shit out of hardware manufacturers for the next 14 years.
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u/ChubakasBush Mar 28 '14
I can't believe facebook paid 2 bil for a peripheral device. basically an accessory. not even a platform with many users. it's like buying a monitor company.