It's interesting that he's joining Facebook, not Oculus. Oculus is just a "team" now.
Between HTC/Valve and the upcoming Windows Holographic/XboxVR and its upcoming tracked controllers and other competitors on the horizon, I'm not sure what room there is for an Oculus PC product. I also suspect even at the $599 pricing, they're losing money, especially if you consider the millions spent paying for exclusives or even funding full games for what ended up being a market of under 250,000 consumers after 6+ months of hard work and advertising, on top of years of hype. I imagine their projections were in the low millions, not couple hundred thousand.
There was some executive shifting a few months back in VR at Facebook and they seem to be distinguishing already implying that "Desktop VR = Oculus" and that this is only a piece of Facebook's VR work.
Disclaimer: I work at FB.
And before anyone points out Facebook is interesting to work on because of the sheer size of the userbase the same argument could be said for working on McDonalds, Pepsi or any other low grade mass consumption product that's bad for you.
It seems like a fallacy if I understand you correctly (which may/may not be the case):
If A -> B, and you claim -B, that doesn't mean -A.
e.g. If "VR is interesting -> good societal problems to solve" , then "bad societal problem" doesn't mean progressing FB isn't interesting.
No, just that VR isn't bad or mainstream yet so you have more opportunity to shape and steer it. Tough to do if you are chained to a goliath and it's needs.
Now days, it doesn't sound quite so interesting. Back then it was impressive. There's so much extra tech available to everyone now, it's not nearly as tough as it was then.
I'm not much of a walmart fan for various reasons, but that sounded like pretty darn interesting work.
Millions of people use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family. It's the platform that has powered trillions of meaningful social connections over the years. It's not junk food or sugar water.
There's a good reason why friendships would either grow stronger or grow appart over the years. It is called Dumbar Number.