Facebook’s acquisition of virtual reality dealer Oculus for $2 billion has caused some head-scratching in the tech and investor community, with many questioning the buy.
After all, Facebook has snatched up a number of startups, more recently buying Whatsapp for a reported $16 billion and we all remember Instagram coming into the Facebook fold in 2012, when a $1 billion price tag sounded like a lot.
Others see this is as Zuckerbergian foresight and an effort to stay ahead of the increasingly fast-paced tech arms race:
…tech companies stay on top by making bold moves that look far down the road rather than focusing on the short term.
And when one considers the potential for a technology like that behind Whatsapp, which effectively eliminates the mobile phone monopoly over live communication, meaning none of us will ever have to “buy minutes” or wait on customer service from another one of these savage phone companies, I think Facebook knows exactly what it’s doing.
Within the last decade, you had a maximum amount of time, and even allotted windows in which you could communicate by voice over distances for premium prices that we all hated paying (and signing multi-year contracts as a pretense!).
But now, you can keep an all-day multi-person video chat running all day for a year, for the price of your internet connection or the Wi-Fi wherever you’re at. And just wait until some real competition kicks in among providers.
In the case of Oculus, let’s just take Zuckerberg’s word for it from Time:
“Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said in a press conference. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play and communicate.”
Many companies and the investors accustomed to profiting from them are counting on old-world, often outmoded ways of thinking that guarantee the consistency of the old days (to a degree) but ward off any risk beyond the equations that govern “sound” investment.
Fortunately, young visionaries like Zuckerberg, who have arguably changed the world in immeasurable ways already, are key to the evolution of not just our technology but our civilization as a whole, facilitating communication across the planet in an open source format and lowering the tarnished barriers of nations and peoples, all through an Internet connection which, by the way, Facebook is also working to expand universally.
And when virtual reality headgear becomes the next smartphone, hopefully the “Dark Helmet” style will be an option.
What do you think is the next big innovation?
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