Facebook buys Oculus Rift

LeSedna

LeSedna

Mat or Mateo
Jan 20, 2008
5,391
2
38
Montpellier, France
FB and google get way too intrusive for my taste.

Minecraft owner :
"We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out."
- @notch

For oculus defense, they felt threatened by Sony who are developing their own unit, and they cannot compete with sony, they are just a kickstarter success story. But really, the oculus rift, Facebook ?
 
It totally depends on what they do with it. It's hard for me to imagine that tech getting folded in with FB's existing products. Anyway, good for the OR team. They raised money on kickstarter a couple of years ago and are now filthy rich.
 
What? I remember the oculus guys saying they didn't want to be sold to somebody who doesn't have their own vision. And that they have had good offers before and would refuse any of them. So dissapointed. I see no links and I gotta go gain them gainz so I hope this is a hoax when I come back. If true then I hope the fb guys don't fuck this up.
 
Initally I thought there's no market in the mainstream for VR hardware ... but if Facebook is willing to play 2 billions for Ocolus Rift it makes me think again....

But more than that I'm very concerned about their vision. If they pay that much, they see it as a part of a bigger picture, which I'm afraid to think through....
 
That and this bugs me:

http://time.com/34025/the-free-marketing-gravy-train-is-over-on-facebook/

Then again...

"
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
"
 
indecizo said:
What? I remember the oculus guys saying they didn't want to be sold to somebody who doesn't have their own vision. And that they have had good offers before and would refuse any of them. So dissapointed. I see no links and I gotta go gain them gainz so I hope this is a hoax when I come back. If true then I hope the fb guys don't fuck this up.
Click to expand...

http://www.businessweek.com/article...s-the-matrix-and-buys-oculus-vr-for-2-billion

It's one thing to not sell your tech for market value but 2 billion is way above market. Also, it's 2 billion fucking dollars. Regardless of their passion, sweat equity and vision it's ultimately a business that they own and someone offered to make them billionaires.
 
1613954_615170251894510_1144046377_n.jpg
 
egan. said:
http://www.businessweek.com/article...s-the-matrix-and-buys-oculus-vr-for-2-billion

It's one thing to not sell your tech for market value but 2 billion is way above market. Also, it's 2 billion fucking dollars. Regardless of their passion, sweat equity and vision it's ultimately a business that they own and someone offered to make them billionaires.
Click to expand...

As long as Oculus remains in the spotlight and continues to impress, rumors will be running rampant. Some people think Microsoft, Google, Apple or any number of tech or gaming firms will purchase Oculus. And you can bet some have already tried. For now, Luckey insists that he's staying independent.
"We want to do things our way. There are certainly people who are interested... but we have a vision for our consumer product and we know that we're going to be able to pull it off. We don't want to be assimilated into someone who's going to have us working on their own product or their own vision of VR - we want to be able to deliver our own vision of what VR is," he said.

So even if a company like Amazon made a huge offer, it wouldn't matter? "Nobody can say it doesn't matter - everyone has a number," Luckey admitted. "But I don't think there's a reasonable number that would make me say, 'You know I was going to change the world with VR and try to change humanity forever but here's a number. It really is about making sure that we get to deliver our vision of consumer virtual reality
Click to expand...

lmaed. But I agree. I think anyone would've taken the billions. It's still dissapointing.
 
I don't blame those guys. I would have done the same. Also, as interesting as the offers could have been, they were a 2 million worth startup.

Then, Sony arrives with basically a sony oculus copy. And sony is HUGE. They can make a million of them if this sells well, they have the network to do that. If the guys from oculus did not sign with someone at least as big as sony, they would have been dead already.

What bugs me is what Facebook is becoming. They are trying to compete with google as to who is going to be the best Big Brother.

I even realized myself the other day. Installed Little Snitch on my MBP (for those who don't know it, it's kind of a manual firewall where every new communication between your computer and a server is detected it asks for blocking or allowing it). And holy shit, Google Chrome does send a lot of data for advertisement and unclear things a browser shouldn't even need to send.
 
^Agreed on all points.

and again, remember guys:
It's 2 fucking billion dollars.

Mat, you can still opt not to use FB if that bugs you...altho yeah, if they keep buying into shit it's hard to avoid it. If you're not going to cancel your i-net account that is ;)
 
To paraphrase a co-worker of mine:

"If I had a project that I was super, super passionate about and someone came along and offered me $2 billion, I'd find something else to be super, super passionate about... like having $2 billion."
 
Mago said:
^Agreed on all points.

and again, remember guys:
It's 2 fucking billion dollars.

Mat, you can still opt not to use FB if that bugs you...altho yeah, if they keep buying into shit it's hard to avoid it. If you're not going to cancel your i-net account that is ;)
Click to expand...

I would if I could, now. The problem is by living constantly abroad (I am right now typing from Umea, sweden) if I cut Facebook I loose a lot of contact with my friends. When I am at home I can live with just calling everyone all the time, no problem.

JeffTD said:
To paraphrase a co-worker of mine:

"If I had a project that I was super, super passionate about and someone came along and offered me $2 billion, I'd find something else to be super, super passionate about... like having $2 billion."
Click to expand...

Or even better, "I'd negotiate to still work on what I am passionate about even after I sold it for 2 billion".

These guys did the right thing from their own perspective, they probably are multimillionnaire each now thanks to that investment. Not that it is an absolute goal in itself, but if I could be multimillionaire I could say "shut the fuck up" to any boss that just makes my life horrible, "I quit" when I want, and "let's install an SSL console in my living room so I can record my album at ease" when I want too.

On the other hand, FB and Google scare me more and more. Samsung and Apple a little less, all they want to do is to release products people buy. They can be considered vectors though. But when my little snitch barely sees a connection from my Safari browser to apple (or something like security related) while at the same time Chrome tries to connect to xxx.addserver / xxx.add.yyy.com etc a few times a day... Fuck it.

Google owning youtube got me angry yesterday too. They are trying every other day to have me switch to "first name + last name" on my youtube account and you cannot choose "no I don't want to, ever". You can only clic on the cross to close the window and they ask again every other day. Simply annoying and intrusive.
 
egan. said:
It's worth noting that they got $2 million on Kickstarter but they got another $90+ million from venture capital firms.
Click to expand...

Okay, still same story thought as this is only a few percent of what they got sold to. I don't even wanna know what Sony could technically use as a budget though.

By the way, are Facebook really able to buy something for 2 billions ? I thought they barely had a working economical model and that was what caused them trouble in the past ?
 
LeSedna said:
Okay, still same story thought as this is only a few percent of what they got sold to. I don't even wanna know what Sony could technically use as a budget though.

By the way, are Facebook really able to buy something for 2 billions ? I thought they barely had a working economical model and that was what caused them trouble in the past ?
Click to expand...

I didn't mean my post as a correction, I just wanted to give a little additional perspective.
The media likes to talk about Facebook's problems and the silicon valley bubble (the wealth is largely hypothetical) however their stock is up 300% from 9 months ago.
Before I lived here I didn't understand how vast the wealth of Facebook and Google is. It defies logic but $2billion is simply not a big deal to them. Also, it's worth noting that the deal was valued at 2 billion but I'm not sure anyone knows the ratio of cash to stocks. Obviously those are very different things from a biz perspective.
Facebook has an enterprise value of $155billion. For scale, Sony has an EV of $28billion.
 
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