I worked on Portal and it came down to:
1. Cambridge Analytica. It is difficult to persuade people - and the media - you can be trusted to put a camera in their homes while you’re fighting a massive privacy scandal.
2. A leadership coup resulted in the project moving under Reality Labs, which never really wanted to be in the smart device business in the first place.
There were a bunch of other issues, but these two basically doomed the project from the start, which is a shame as it was well received by those who actually bought it.
Messenger is native at Facebook. It's born on Facebook.com as a floating non-permanent window that only works when the other person is online. Wikipedia seems to confirm this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_(software)#History
I agree on the Portal, it's perfect to call my grandma. I dread the day it will stop working because the alternative is an iPad that is worse in nearly every way (as a tabletop VC device for grandma)
The only thing you can do as a company is to react and sometimes exploit market dynamics.
That’s what Meta did with Threads. You have to give em credit for that.