Facebook Buys Oculus

WordPress was acting weird for me yesterday so no post. 😦

I have written about Oculus in the previous few months. It’s a company making VR headmounted displays with the intent to bring them to a mass market. It was created from a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 and it just got purchased by Facebook.

If I was to list the top 10 companies that would buy Oculus, Facebook wouldn’t have made the list so why did they do it and what are the ramifications?

I think Facebook bought them because their CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want anyone else to buy them. Oh I’m sure he thinks the technology has promise, but really this was just a game of keepaway from Google, Apple and Microsoft. You can do that when you have $2 billion burning a hold in your pocket. Besides if the market crashes again, stocks like Facebook will be hit hard so you might as well put that inflated capitalization to use right?

In the short term I don’t expect anything to change with Oculus except they might be able to tap into a new funding stream and accelerate their progress. Longer term, I don’t think even Zuckerberg has a plan here.

Ars Technica has a good write up about the purchase.

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