People in the /r/oculus reddit are already expressing strong feelings of betrayal - eighty comments in under ten minutes, none positive.
What a bizarre move.
My prediction: Glass will not pan out for Google, and Oculus Rift with languish with Facebook as a result. Facebook may put out some half-hearted "Use a Rift to view your friends 3d panoramas of their vacation" nonsense that nobody will care about, and the industry will be put off VR for another half-decade at least.
I'm less worried about folks being turned off of VR - That Oculus has such great traction means that other big tech manufacturers won't be too far behind emulating their display technology and coming out with competing products at lower pricing than the VR. At least one of them will actually be decent enough to sell well.
They are two very different products but I maintain that they represent two different approaches to the same problem, pushing us past our current understanding of what I/O devices are. Google Glass is a push into the unknown, Facebook may not agree that it is in the right approach, but you are kidding yourself if they aren't looking at Google and wondering why they are not pushing I/O bounds as well. They're both looking for "the next smartphone", trying to determine what that will be.
The industry has been turned off of VR in the past by botched executions, and I am afraid it can happen again.
Oculus has will be the thing that teenagers use to hang out online in the future. Something like Second Life will replace Instagram which replaced Facebook which replaced tying up the landline talking for hours each evening with the BFF.
Facebook also doesn't have their own GAE or self-driving car program, but those aren't particularly relevant to Facebook's core business.
But completely logical from Oculus' perspective -- if someone offers you $2B to cash out before you've even launched, you'd be silly to say no.
I mean, some folks stand by their principles. But, seriously, it's not easy.
But even if you think their motives behind the charity are selfish, don't discount the effects.
How many Einsteins, von Neumans, Ramanujans, or Musks (pick your genius of choice, really) are stillborn in the developing world because of malaria or HIV? How many never achieve their potential because of malnutrition or polio?
If the Gates Foundation eradicates malaria and polio, and we get a few more world-changing geniuses out of it, they'll have done much more to push the technological envelope than any other endeavor.
So Paul Graham selling Viaweb to Yahoo and starting Y Combinator is an example of "killing companies"?
Google has a long-term, sustainable business that continually makes huge strides in new markets - from revolutionising search, to speeding up the evolution of the internet through projects like Chrome, smashing up the smartphone market with Android, and so on. Facebook on the other hand is a pretty good social network that seems to have hit its peak and is difficult to monetise, where the only strides that are taken appear to be buying companies with overlapping userbases in order to cling on to relevance.
Okay, that's definitely my personal bias showing.
Expect more acquisitions like this. It only makes sense to diversify.
yeah, what's next? zuck buying spacex so you can visit friends on the moon?
I would imagine Facebook feels under pressure to build up a core hardware engineering team. It's pretty clear that embedded and wearable computing is going to be a huge industry at some point in the future, and Facebook is going to need to get into that industry unless it wants to be indebted to and reliant upon hardware manufacturers.
So really, this acquisition makes sense for the same kind of reasons Google acquiring Nest makes sense - neither company has strong expertise or experience in consumer electronics hardware, and they need it going forward.
I think this may for the best for the future of VR. We know the gaming industry will use VR at some point and we know how they'll use it for the most part. It's a discussion well established in our popular culture. The potential innovation of VR as a medium would more likely happen with a company like Facebook rather than one like Valve.
I don't know how I feel about it, from a personal standpoint, and I don't understand it from a business perspective. Oculus don't really have an idea of how big/small the market is for the product yet, even.
Bah. I still want a DK2, and I still love what Oculus have done for VR.