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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Why?
Everything successful fb has done in more than a decade is copying or acquiring competitors.
Zuck has spent a few years setting $36,000,000,000 on fire building secondlife2, that nobody wants. The stock is down 25% in the last 2 years.
facebook is like google, both are advertising companies at their core. They both leveraged one idea to serve adds really well and have failed to produce anything new in house since.
Fair and accurate.
Despite everyone wanting them to fail, this is inaccurate. They've sold as much Quest hardware as Microsoft sells Xboxes in the same time period, and those cost figures include hardware, and ALL their VR software, across multiple different games and apps. They did not spend that much on Horizon Worlds which is their failed second life clone.
Again, fair and accurate, though missing the mechanism for how this occurs. Because they're advertising companies, they're great at tracking users and prioritizing market research. This is what makes them great at copying stuff, because they're very very good at using market research and user data to determine which are the features actually worth copying.
Neither Microsoft or Facebook are making relevant money from hardware. All of those headsets (like all those xboxes) have only one purpose: selling software, which the platform owner takes a cut from.
Incidentally: from 2021 to 2022 reality labs both sold less hardware and less software, while growing their costs, probably due to research and development and preproduction for both Quest Pro - which is cancelled already - and Quest 3. Let’s wait and see, what Quest 3 is getting Facebook, but currently reality labs is failing, no matter how much I personally want them to, as well.
Except that the main point I'm refuting isn't whether or not they're profitable, but whether or not people want them. The hardware sales clearly show that they are desired products.
From a profit and loss standpoint they may be failing, or they may just still be early days of investment and expected operating at a loss. Xbox lost Microsoft money for years before it made them any real money. It doesn't hurt to diversify your revenue sources.