What. the. fuck.
Facebook acquires Oculus VR
481–490 of 871 posts
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#482Can someone please explain to me how you can just go on a spending spree and spend $21 Billion in under a month with no one going:
'Hey, umm guys, I know we really like the company, but lets have things cool down a bit after spend 19 billion.'
In the Whatsapp acquisition thread someone made a comment about FB thinking their stock valuation is overpriced. I'm curious to hear what the split (cash/stock) is. If it's stock heavy, I'm almost certain that person was right.
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but Instagram and Parse are services that fall within Facebook's major product area and have teams with related experience to Facebook's daily operations. Oculus is not a service, just a technology; one that has no relation (nor clear route to one) to any Facebook-held product.
> Oculus is not a service, just a technology; one that has no relation (nor clear route to one) to any Facebook-held product. Exactly. This is what diversification is all about. At it's core, Facebook is now a public technology company, which means that creating value for its shareholders is it's primary focus. Buying something that looks like it might be a big deal before it becomes a big deal is doing that. Killing…
>Diversification
Conglomerates have some of the thinnest margins across many industries.
Jumping into the electronic devices industry with a product that hasn't even hit market yet is a bad gamble, especially since a dedicated electronics manufacturer (Sony) is going to release the same product but with an already dedicated market (Playstation).
It would have been better to wait until OR released, because then early adopters would have demonstrated if it is a viable product.
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe this acquisition was also a play to acquire more engineering talent. Through this acquisition they acquired John Carmack which is a fairly famous engineer amongst the tech community. That component alone strikes me as an incredibly awesome PR move in terms of recruitment. As far as I'm concerned Facebook is the only competitor to Google at this point. Facebook is just trying to keep pace. I assume they're g…
Carmack left iD because they wouldn't let him work on the sort of stuff he wanted to work on. I see no reason he'd stick around Faceulus as an acquihire; if he's working at Facebook in the future, it's because they're letting Oculus do what it was doing when Facebook bought it.
@ hack_edu
Contracts can be broken. I really doubt John Carmack has to do anything he doesn't want to do. It will be the canary in the coalmine as far as whether I purchase an Oculus HMD when they release.
I do hate this "winner-take-all" situation where a few tech companies in the US acquire every single cutting edge company.
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#485Damn! I don't like this. I had hoped they jump in bed with valve. Yes, I just really dislike facebook, so I hate to see them aquiring something i was really excited about. Also from the article: > After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor fa…
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Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#486I believe all the negativity here is as though David (Oculus VR) has partnered with Goliath (Facebook). What I don't understand is why HN users are already able to rationalize why Facebook is the antagonist here and why Oculus VR might not have a strategy bigger than gaming.
Facebook has already proven to be a huge antagonist in many many ways. We can, however, give Oculus the benefit of the doubt; they might have ended up doing nasty things even if they hadn't gotten acquired by Facebook, sure, but Carmack's past actions were never even close to the nastyness of Zuck's actions. It's just a matter of analyzing the past and making a hypothesis on the future based on that. I don't see what's so difficult to understand.
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#487[deleted]
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#488I think that people would have been happier if it had been acquired by North Korea. I was seriously excited by OR, but for me personally its now DOA. It says a lot about a company that Sony is now the preferred alternative.
Everyone expecting an instant turn to the dark side are naive. This is going only one way:
1. Facebook will say "We're hands off".
2. They'll persuade Carmack to stay and they'll burn cash to make it dominant and in no way corrupted by FB or data capture.
3. Once dominant they'll slowly remove privacy from it and other things geeks and people who care hold important. Carmack will quietly move on to something interesting, and few will notice.
4. The rest of the population will stay with it as they don't know/care, and geeks and everyone else will need to use it even though they really would prefer not to.
Classic frog boiling situation.
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Facebook could stay hands off No, they could have made a sizable investment without having a controlling stake in it. No, they Acquired it. You don't do that unless you want to change something there. My best hope is that the Zuck sees something cool going on with the Oculus and wants to try his hand at something new. My worst fear is that they will develop the 'Oculus API' as a wrapper around the original API and F…
My god, the tinfoil on HN has become unbearable. Are you even listening to yourself?
Are you even listening to yourself arguing with nothing but a baseless ad hominem AND still having the gall to ask someone if he's listening to himself?
Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR
#490Why on earth would Oculus sell at all, least of all to Facebook? What possible reason could Facebook have to purchase a company so far removed from its core competency? 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.
I'm assuming that Facebook, given its size, has at least some leverage over the W3 standards committee. Imagine VR integration inside the browser (at least for positional tracking and latency mitigation).