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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

It's more than that. It comes down to owning a platform.

Apple's iOS walled garden is a slap to Zuck's face. In VR, Zuck saw a chance to own an emerging platform.

Remember the FB phone? Amazon's Fire phone? Both attempts to own a platform. If your revenue depends on ads, owning the platform is like adding fuel to fire.

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This. I understood the project as less about the flashy ten-year vision, and more about the same thing that drove Google to build Chrome and Android: not wanting to face lockout from competing platforms.

I don't think this has been _successful_, but the concern about platform access seems _reasonable_ to me. If you think it's existential, burning billions on a long-shot might even be a good strategy, though one that seems likely to fail.

The reason Meta's VR/AR effort has failed is because they didn't care at the top about making it for current users. The primary focus was for making long-term profitable/business platform too soon. If they had a clue they wouldn't have stalled on the success of the Quest/Quest 2 and made a Quest 3 in time for the next Sept-holiday season. Even late the projected specs for Quest 3 are short of expectations.

My humble opinion is that it's about the AR endgame, and building out the technical capability to get there (via VR mixed reality, wearable devices, etc) AND owning the platform.

They’ve succeeded in building a platform, but they seem to have forgotten that for it to be valuable they need users to actually want to use it

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