I'd also point out that a huge number of disruptive technologies that succeeded where other had failed did so because of... content.
It's effectively impossible to buy sufficient content to meet AAA platform expectations these days. Because you're competing against incredibly competent, experienced, and well-stocked legacy alternatives.
Consequently, either (a) "upgrading" an existing deep pool of legacy content (Google search, iPhone/web) or (b) turning every user into a content producer (Facebook, TikTok) have very good chances of success.
And finally, to call out a fundamental blind spot: if Facebook doesn't lose, they win.
Everyone pretends Facebook needs to win the VR market. They don't. They just need to keep enough of an eye on it that they aren't blindsided by a competitor, and then scale up their engineering once a seed appears successful. Their size, revenue, and ubiquity will win by default.
If FB has 100 engineers working on VR for 20 years with nothing to show for it, but that allows them to ramp up when something magic finally happens (right hardware breakthrough, etc), then that's FB money well spent.
It's effectively impossible to buy sufficient content to meet AAA platform expectations these days. Because you're competing against incredibly competent, experienced, and well-stocked legacy alternatives.
Consequently, either (a) "upgrading" an existing deep pool of legacy content (Google search, iPhone/web) or (b) turning every user into a content producer (Facebook, TikTok) have very good chances of success.
And finally, to call out a fundamental blind spot: if Facebook doesn't lose, they win.
Everyone pretends Facebook needs to win the VR market. They don't. They just need to keep enough of an eye on it that they aren't blindsided by a competitor, and then scale up their engineering once a seed appears successful. Their size, revenue, and ubiquity will win by default.
If FB has 100 engineers working on VR for 20 years with nothing to show for it, but that allows them to ramp up when something magic finally happens (right hardware breakthrough, etc), then that's FB money well spent.