Facebook Just Bought Oculus For 2 Billion

Kiopa_Matt said:
Uh oh! Scary times for Facebook. Deviating from your core product / service has brought many of a business crumbling down. Let's see what happens with this.
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It's also necessary if you want to build a huge business.

Apple made computers. They went into mp3 players, that made them.

Google did search. They now do, well, everything.

There comes a point where to keep growing you have to push into new sectors and do new things. This is an investment in the future. Facebook is doing everything it can to maintain its position. Snapchat offer, Whatsapp, virtual reality.. All things which could potentially disrupt the way Facebook is used worldwide.

The important thing is to make sure you give the team autonomy to do the new things well. Make sure you have experts in that sector running that part of the business. Most huge corporate businesses fail when that original entrepreneurial drive is lost, and innovation stops. They then squeeze all the profit they can out of existing products until they are usurped by innovators who destroy their business.

Case in point -- Kodak.
 


When large companies purchase smaller companies, I see it as a touchstone of their future decline. When they stop innovating, they go shopping.

Facebook is getting stale, and they know it.
 
Uh oh! Scary times for Facebook. Deviating from your core product / service has brought many of a business crumbling down. Let's see what happens with this.
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Are you serious? Facebook is currently trying everything in its power to establish themselves as the #1 communication provider in the world. Whatsapp, snapchat are obvious examples, VR communication is more of a longshot, but could prove to be veeeery profitable. They need to get their feet in the door and of course evolve. I bet Zuckerberg knows all too well, that facebook alone is a pretty unstable business alone. See Myspace. They are trying to justify their stock prices to avoid a quick yet steep downfall.

When large companies purchase smaller companies, I see it as a touchstone of their future decline. When they stop innovating, they go shopping.
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No, they're doing it because it is faster, and means faster growth potential.
 
@Skyfire

Xamarin holds the licensing for Mono, Unity uses an old ass version of Mono because they haven't been able to license the new version. Xamarin wants more than Unity is willing to pay, which must be a lot considering they require it for porting.

If you or any other WF members are interested in using Unity hit me up, I have many thousands of $$ worth of assets off the store that can be used commercially. I can throw you whatever you could need for any type of game you could want to make. From realistic to cartoony.
 
The investors who put in 20 million will make 20x profit for oculus.. This seems like a mismatch between these two companies but facebook, twitter, apple, microsoft, google and the rest have billions just sitting on the sidelines so if it fails who cares. Google dropped what 12 billion on Motorola, split it up and sold off what it didn't need and took the losses. Who knows what pending patents are behind this whole thing.

Facebook is good at one thing and now there just fishing for new ideas. Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo with all there gaming experience are probably laughing at this and thanking them.
 
kryaa said:
Are you serious? Facebook is currently trying everything in its power to establish themselves as the #1 communication provider in the world. Whatsapp, snapchat are obvious examples, VR communication is more of a longshot, but could prove to be veeeery profitable. They need to get their feet in the door and of course evolve. I bet Zuckerberg knows all too well, that facebook alone is a pretty unstable business alone. See Myspace. They are trying to justify their stock prices to avoid a quick yet steep downfall.
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Exactly. You said basically exactly what I did. I didn't say bad decision, I said "scary times for Facebook". Who knows what will happen.

There's a chance they will completely underestimate this, spend 10 times more and three times the amount of time than initially expected, only to find out usable VR technology they can roll out to the masses is still years off. During this time, balance sheets take a beating, stock holders get pissed, sell offs begin to happen, and down the slippery slope we go.

On the flip side, this could turn out to be an amazing investment, huge returns, and Faceook becomes the #1 in social VR. Who knows, maybe they even become larger than Google in the future.

Never said it was a stupid decision. Just a dangerous one.
 
It is supposedly the year 2014 and a fortune 500 firm just acquired the latest in virtual reality tech to integrate your life with shit that's not real.

Or did it? How do we really know this hasn't already happened 1000s of years ago?

Who knows what year it really is, we're all living in the matrix right now re-living life that has already lived. We could all be strapped with Oculus Rifts right now and not even know it.

Bow to your real overlords in a virtual space: Facebook.
 
Andrew Scherer said:
Or did it? How do we really know this hasn't already happened 1000s of years ago?

Who knows what year it really is, we're all living in the matrix right now re-living life that has already lived. We could all be strapped with Oculus Rifts right now and not even know it.

Bow to your real overlords in a virtual space: Facebook.
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tumblr_m3ibs7v5yt1rup5moo1_500.gif
 
Never said it was a stupid decision. Just a dangerous one.
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Well, it's 700 Million Cash max. + a bunch of overvalued stock. They're granting oculus autonomy so it seems they're more interested in letting it play out for a while, not putting all their money into it. But even if it proves to be a risky move: Does a Top Tier Tech company really have a choice? Sitting on your ass seldomly ends well. I mean it can, see microsoft....but in the end you can't be #1 without bold decisions.
 
splok said:
BUT you did't get source access with UDK.
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Correct, but that does not make the following any less incorrect (it's the same engine).

shindig said:
Unreal engine is much different from Unreal Development Kit - UDK which was available...Unreal engine is much much better.
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shindig said:
@Skyfire

Xamarin holds the licensing for Mono, Unity uses an old ass version of Mono because they haven't been able to license the new version. Xamarin wants more than Unity is willing to pay, which must be a lot considering they require it for porting.
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It's more complicated than that. Mono is opensource, LGPL. LGPL doesn't allow code to be used in restrictive environments, so Unity still uses an older version of Mono that is under a different license from Novell. Unity has made significant changes to their branch of Mono, and will continue to do so. It might be old, but no more than any thing else that continues to be updated, and modified.

And even is LGPL wasn't an issue, Simply keeping up with whatever version of Mono is released would be impractical due to the changes Unity makes for their own needs.


About Mono - Mono

About Mono
Mono, the open source development platform based on the .NET framework
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I recommend you read What is Mono - Mono to better understand what Mono is.

shindig said:
If you or any other WF members are interested in using Unity hit me up, I have many thousands of $$ worth of assets off the store that can be used commercially. I can throw you whatever you could need for any type of game you could want to make. From realistic to cartoony.
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I appreciate the offer, but I've been a Unity dev since '06 or '07, I moved to it shortly after Epic acquired the Reality Engine from AS and shut down development on it.
 
SkyFire said:
Facebook wants Oculus for social of the future.

I'm boxing up my Oculus in the morning and putting it on ebay.

Fuck Facebook.
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FB are some scary people. My gf took some pics last weekend, and when she uploaded them to fb, they tagged everyone for her, including people in the background who were barely visible.

What they really plan to do is build a structure where everyone is identified, everywhere, by everyone, geolocated, and they control the data for sale. If that isn't their sales goal now, it will be in the future.
 
User9364 said:
FB are some scary people. My gf took some pics last weekend, and when she uploaded them to fb, they tagged everyone for her, including people in the background who were barely visible.

What they really plan to do is build a structure where everyone is identified, everywhere, by everyone, geolocated, and they control the data for sale. If that isn't their sales goal now, it will be in the future.
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And honestly, I find the whole thing creepy.

I think it's fine if people want to telegraph their location to everyone via social media by their own accord. I think it's dumb and ill-advised, but whatever. That's their choice.

When people want to use (fairly cheap) facial recognition technology to broadcast my location to the world without my consent, especially in real time, there's some line stepping going on there.

I don't like government use of such shit, and sure don't need an API going on with that. I personally have some pretty good home security shit going on, but this is a robbery bonanza.
 
I honestly don't understand the backlash from the kickstarter users. I don't think I understand kickstarter users at all.

They seem to be confusing being an investor with being a customer.
 
I had the oculus on for a couple hours today wrapping up a project and I still feel like I just got off a ship onto solid ground. The creative director wouldn't even put it on after the first "experience". I almost fell out of my chair when it got to a cliff ledge and walked out on a beam and I looked down. Like peering over the grand canyon with no railing heh.

Then I made an underwater scene with stingrays, coral, caustics, animated skybox, and schools of fish darting around that's pretty fun to watch. I can just stand there forever looking around at all the shit lol.

My boss is loving the exposure the FB acquisition has brought to oculus.
 
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