> I wasn't personally involved in any of the negotiations -- I spent an afternoon talking technology with Mark Zuckerberg, and the next week I find out that he bought Oculus.
He's a CTO and he finds it out like that? There's something I don't understand.
He wasn't even involved in the negotiations of Facebook taking control of Oculus, and Carmack expects us to believe that he or Oculus itself will have any sort of control once they are in Facebook's headquarters?
> John Carmark: The experience is too obviously powerful, and it makes converts on contact. The fairly rapid involvement of the Titans is inevitable, and the real questions were how deeply to partner, and with who.
Carmack is correct in saying the Titans will get involved, but I think many people (including the post author) are disappointed that Oculus has forgone becoming a Titan themselves. Committing to such a deep partnership at this stage feels like a big misstep. Imagine where Facebook would be if they had sold out to a company like Apple right before they allowed non-college kids to use the service.
Another point I haven't seen raised: when it comes to VR hardware and software, anyone who doesn't get in bed with a Titan will end up mired in one bullshit patent suit after another.
You left out the previous paragraph, which explains why Carmack feels the need to partner with a Titan, rather than go at it alone.
Not sure that I agree this move was necessary at this point in time, but I definitely see his fear of the potential consequences of refusing to strike such a partnership.
Exactly right. Would Zuckerberg give himself the same advice he gave Palmer when trying to convince him to sell the company? My guess is he wouldn't. He'd say "Don't touch the money, and keep going on your own - especially when you have such great hype around your company and product. You'll make 100x more this way."
I feel like we've gone full retard about the potential of VR again. Facebook has bought a promising headset technology, but we're a long way off people living in a virtual world controlled by Facebook. While I fully expect Facebook to data mine any hardware they control I'm not certain how it corresponds with the nightmare vision here.
If anything Facebook buying Oculus so early is a good thing for people scared of Facebook's impact on VR. I think there is a long and involved period of VR being refined by hardcore gamers before it tentatively ventures into virtual sports and virtual meetups et al. I just don't see the big gaming companies wanting to do deals with Facebook - they hate Steam for its platform control and its communication overlays - they'll be very wary of a Facebook chat overlay finding its way into to Oculus driver v1.2. And I just don't think Oculus as funded by Facebook is going to be living or dieing with gamers feedback like they would as an independent company. I doubt they are going to sacrifice enough to meet those demands and be reshaped by them.
The problem with buying them early is that Oculus could become the Microsoft of the industry on PC. They could set precedents/biases we'll have to live with for decades to come. For example there might be other headsets that rely on Oculus API/SDK, etc. IDK we'll just have to wait and find out.
Unless you've developed games for the facebook platform, it can be hard to understand why so many devs reacted so negatively to the news. I've made facebook games and decided not to spend money on the second dev kit, so maybe I can shed some light as to why.
As a gaming platform, Facebook sucks. Pure and simple. The APIs we need to use to make money change, sometimes on a daily basis. We get no notification when these changes happen. We find out because our games suddenly stop working. Facebook also has a history of trying to screw game developers over in an attempt to get a bigger chunk of cash for themselves. Case in point, they tried to mandate that everybody use Facebook Credits for in game currency. Not only did facebook take 30% off the top (effectively slashing our existing revenues by 30%), but we had to use their API to process transactions. Their buggy, buggy API. That lasted for maybe 6 months? I'm not sure, I got out of it just before the facebook credits thing went down.
Before everybody jumps on me about Facebook not necessarily locking Oculus game devs into their platform, that doesn't matter. Facebook has a history of treating game devs poorly and as a result I have absolutely no desire to deal with the company again.
> I'm not a "privacy is gone, get over it" sort of person, and I fully support people that want remain unobserved, but that means disengaging from many opportunities. The idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me.
> Being data driven is a GOOD thing for most companies to be. Everyone cheers the novel creative insight and bold leadership that leads to some successes, and tut tuts about companies ending up poorly by blindly following data, but cold analysis of the data is incredibly important, and I tend to think the world will be improved with more and better data analysis.
> I have never felt harmed by data mining, and I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this? Be specific.
I find this slightly alarming. Apparently John Carmack was lucky enough not to have been unfairly prosecuted and doesn't have any secrets that could cost him for example his job.
But what happens if one day John Carmack's activities and opinions become illegal? This has happened many times in history and there's no reason to believe it won't happen again.
The scariest thing about data collection is not what is currently happening with it, but what oppressive regimes could do with it. Imagine what if the gestapo or the stasi had all the information at its disposal that Facebook has? Or the NSA even?
To me it just underscores that even a lot of smart people don't really think about far reaching consequences of data mining. Sure, most people don't care that [insert company here]'s algorithms are crawling your data and sending you product ads based on that, but what about the NSA and their secret courts and secret warrants forcing companies to hand over that data? Even if companies don't comply, SIGINT agencies will just hack their systems and get their hands on the data anyway.
And even if there is absolutely nothing incriminating about that data NOW, there's no evidence that will stay the case forever.
I've just lost a massive amount of respect for Carmack. I actually thought he'd have an intelligent opinion on subjects like this.
Perhaps you should offer up your intelligent opinion as a counter? There is no risk in being thrown in jail because of data mining--NSA can directly observe what you do. There is no reason to mine to deduce that you may be or become an X sympathizer (where X is dangerous to the current power structure), they can simply observe you communicating with known X's or viewing information in support of X. Your concerns about data mining are misplaced and overblown.
There is simply nothing of interest to the government that can be learned about you by mining that they can't learn through direct means already deployed.
I have already offered my opinion in the parent post but here goes again:
> There is no risk in being thrown in jail because of data mining
Not now. What about in 20 years when the concept of thoughtcrime finds its way into the legal system? Some countries already/still (whichever you like) already have that and people there routinely die because of accessing "illegal" information online.
> There is simply nothing of interest to the government that can be learned about you by mining that they can't learn through direct means already deployed.
False. Let's imagine someone likes to play out their wildest fantasies in a VR world using a device like Rift. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that person has fantasies about gay unicorns. It just so happens that the state has reverted to fundamentalist ways and such fantasies are now punishable by death. With all this data mining in place, what prevents law enforcement agencies from subpoenaing FB and tapping directly into that data feed and making arrests based on that? I know it's a far fetched scenario, but the principle applies to almost anything. Replace gay unicorns with whatever you like. People have murdered other people over more inane things.
Also, if you haven't heard about law enforcement agencies doing parallel construction based on tip offs from SIGINT programs, you should read up on that.
> Your concerns about data mining are misplaced and overblown.
No, my concerns are well placed. Just because there is no abuse happening now (and there likely is), doesn't mean there won't be any in the future - with the data that's being mined as we speak. Better to be safe than sorry and stop this nonsense dead in its tracks, don't you think?
And even if there was zero danger of getting harassed by the system based on the information you consume online, I don't want anyone to know what I think based purely on principle.
I don't disagree with your reasoning at all--I have made those same arguments myself at various times. Where we disagree is on the meaning of data mining. When I think of mining, I think of deducing facts that are not directly present in the data. For example, imagine the government deducing your attraction to gay unicorns by some tangentially related facts about you {likes unicorns, watches teletubbies, is a brony} -> {attraction to gay unicorns}. My argument is that such a thing is impossible. There is nothing of interest that a government could learn about you through indirect means (mining relationships out of disparate data), that they can't learn through direct observation. That is, instead of having to deduce your attraction to gay unicorns, they would simply observe it in the virtual world (leak regarding monitoring of WoW). Under this understanding of data mining, worrying about the government mining is misdirection--they will simply watch your avatar get sodomized in real time.
What's interesting to me, and we've seen this with WhatsApp only a few weeks ago, is that being acquired by Facebook seems to destroy the public image of a product.
Positive public perception has value, and can (at least in theory) be measured in dollars. In accounting terminology, it's part of what's usually called a company's "goodwill".
If Facebook continues to so negatively effect the public's opinion of every company it acquires, this means that Facebook might get a lot less out of those acquisitions than they might have hoped.
Really? Is the public image of instagram 'destroyed'? You're in the tech bubble. In the consumer world no one cares as long products perform well and cheaply.
This is really it. We in our techno bubble care about these things. For normal people, its basically a non-issue. Heck, I even forget that Facebook bought Instagram unless I'm reminded of it here and there. This goes to Facebook''s credit that they do seem to leave their acquisitions alone.
Interesting you think this. From my point of view techno bubble people have very little reason to care about yet another text chat app that they don't use being bought by facebook. On the other hand, all the normal people who had left facebook which is no longer cool for whatsapp because it's cooler (and I've overheard these normal people saying exactly that to each other) are going to be pretty upset at the idea that anything from whatsapp might start showing up on someones facebook wall.
How do you measure a company's public image in numbers? If you can't, then discussing it based on anecdotes is the best we can do. (My non-techie friends have left WhatsApp for Threema, but I live inside the German-language bubblesphere, so YMMV.)
Or the other way around: Before the acquisition, I was already on the fence about the Oculus Rift, but now I won't touch one with a ten-foot pole. In which statistic would my change of mind even show up?
I don't think it has much to do with his salary. My view of him is largely positive as well, but from what I've read (Masters of Doom, a lot of his writing) he is not a man to whom empathy comes easily (which is not to say he isn't a good, moral man).
To clarify; his relationship with and view of FaceBook is a business one. I'm implying not greed, but that by virtue of the industry he works in his view is likely to much different from that of those who are not in a position to sell to FaceBook, et al.
I'd expect that Facebook will do for Oculus as much as Zenimax did for id.
The best that could happen is that the Zuckster just sends bigger checks to Oculus to expand operations, turning this purchase into more of a round of VC funding than anything else.
The worst case scenario is that it's a purchase like we see in the business world. How many products do better when the company that makes them is bought by IBM or Oracle?
Facebook isn't IBM or Oracle. Instagram is still doing fine, it's kept its own identity and I would never have known they were bought by facebook if it wasn't such huge news. To me, on the surface, it's following the exact path same as it was before the purchase, but it would be naive to think that Facebook's infrastructure and experience with scalability has nothing to do with the fact that instagram is always up and always works as its grown.
I'm not really worried about Facebook "exerting control" in one way or another, per se.
I hope Facebook doesn't kill Oculus as a product. If it goes to market, my sole criteria for purchase will be "does it require a Facebook login, or a connection to Facebook servers"?
I'm fine with hardware that also has a flagship Facebook Space, or whatever. I can choose to avoid that. That's really what I'm hoping for, as it seems like one of the most benign outcomes.
But if it's a fundamental part of the design is that Facebook has to participate in every Oculus experience, well, no sale.
One almost off topic reason is that it seems like today an innovative and successful tech company will face irresistible acquisition offers from one of the "titans." When the offer make the founder a billionaire it will be rare that they are rejected. If they are, I bigger offer will soon follow. Everyone has a price and these cashed up companies have deeper pockets than any company has ever had. The near inevitability of this acquisition (hinted at by Carmack) is IMO the significant element.
In this environment, Google could have gotten near their IPO value years earlier from an acquiring company. Current crop of titans would have been owned by the previous crop and we would be poorer as a whole.
When acquisition offers outpace revenue to this degree it seems almost impossible for a company to stay independent.
> "Honestly, I wasn't expecting Facebook (or this soon). I have zero personal background with them, and I could think of other companies that would have more obvious synergies."
This is the heart of the controversy. Facebook could have easily written an application / demo to integrate with Facebook, but instead they bought the whole company.
Carmack had this to say earlier, in a 3-part Tweet:
"Everyone has had some time to digest the FB deal now. I think it is going to be positive, but clearly many disagree. Much of the ranting has been emotional or tribal, but I am interested in reading coherent viewpoints about objective outcomes. What are the hazards? What should be done to guard against them? What are the tests for failure? Blog and I'll read."
Also, this:
"I would expect Facebook to not exert any overt control over Oculus unless Oculus fumbles badly a few times, at which point they SHOULD."
~~~~
My personal take: At the end of the day, it takes more than vision and hard work to drive a dream into existence... it takes investment. It takes capital. This is what the deal brings to the table.
Not only that, as you probably know by now, Michael Abrash has joined the team. I mean, read Michael's blog and note all of the technical challenges and issues with implementing VR. Read Carmack's technical writings on latency issues. There are a lot of problems to solve, on top of building and delivering a solid, commercial-quality hardware and software experience. For example, there is tracking head position and orientation, rendering without shearing and judder, latency issues, etc... everything must be perfect in order to deliver the perfect experience.
Facebook brings the needed investment, plus the scaling infrastructure experience to the table. John has said, "I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale."
I have a lot of confidence in Oculus VR and their extremely capable team. These good people are experienced and they know the technical and business challenges that are ahead. This is why the acquisition occurred.
The passion is still there. I mean, watch this video again [1]. John hasn't changed. After the acquisition, he said, "For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week. I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR."
And with Michael coming on board, it's a veritable VR Dream Team with the already talent-heavy team of Palmer Luckey, Tom Forsyth [2], Atman Binstock [3], et al.
As Michael said, "That worry is now gone. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory."
Its all sunshine and roses until "the meeting" in which Carmack says "I've started this awesome feature that I feel defines the future of the product and..." a hand goes up and a suit says "that really doesn't fit with 'our vision' for where we want Oculus to go". Game Over.
You kind of forget who you're talking about. One doesn't just say that to John Carmack :)
For a team of new-comers, without both real engineering experience and real business experience, maybe the consequences of the Facebook acquisition could have went the way you imagine, but lots of the Oculus guys are heavyweights and when someone says something that goes against their vision they need to have solid arguments, and even if their arguments will be right, they need to consider that even throwing those arguments at them comes with a huge real risk (of having a team fracture and a bunch of very smart guys leaving the company) and huge real cost (the real productivity decrease that comes from pushing a team in a direction they don't want to go to, and of wasting the big-brains' time in meetings and arguments instead of product development - these kinds of "productivity penalties" ca very well allow a competitor to come up with a better idea before them!).
I find that very difficult to imagine. JC isn't some mid level manager with a pet project in mind. He's one of the founding technical leads in the company FB just acquired. He has high political capital as well as personal financial independence. A close minded brush off like that would be likely to get that suit fired.
It'd be easy to believe that, because it is reassuring in a way that calms anxieties about the future of Oculus.
But you only have to look back to Doom 3 to see the cracks in that idea. Many design decisions of that game were unpopular when it was released, and over the following years it came out that those decisions were driven by technical aspects of the engine. Where rather than the engine sacrificing for the design, design sacrificed for the engine.
So it'd be easy to make the less immediately appealing argument that they should push back on Carmack's vision when they think it's gone off the rails.
links? As I remember it, most of the issues were around the fixed frame rates that were an attempt to unify PC development with console development. Perhaps I am confusing Doom 3 for another game though.
The poster child is the flashlight, sounds stupid now but I remember how much shit it stirred back then. The rest I don't remember off the top of my head, and don't feel like scrubbing through days and days of Bombcast to find.
Your comment assumes that Zuckerberg and the people at Facebook will be incompetent at nurturing an employee like John Carmack and the other talented Oculus VR folk.
If they're smart, they will allow him pretty much free reign, and then put some resources behind his projects to help them mature. (think Sergey Brin or Andy Rubin at Google)
No, it just assumes that the interests of a large corporation which is entering the phase where it needs to show revenue growth every quarter and satisfy shareholders are not aligned with those of a small company attempting to build an experimental product in a completely new field. This is an old story and the outcome is almost always the same (large corp buys small corp, promises to change nothing and stay hands off, circumstances change, large corp looks for projects to downsize or cut). Google has many examples of acquisitions, how many are running in a hands off way now?
On top of that, Facebook has shown itself to be untrustworthy many times from a dev and user perspective (beacon, FB credits etc), so if Carmack wants to avoid that and produce something without intrusive advertising for example, they may well clash.
None of this means it was a bad idea to sell for oculus, just that selling is ceding control completely to the vision of the larger company in the long term.
Facebook does not need to satisfy any shareholder except one.
I mean, hacker news likes to freak out about fiduciary duty and "omg, corporations are obligated to make maximum profit." But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.), and there is near-zero legal possibility of minority investors forcing them to. This is because investors have almost no say unless it is obvious you are trying to screw them -- normally a subset of them -- or unless there is no plausible way a course of action could make money.
I've always thought the fiduciary duty argument was silly (and I'm not HN :), so I agree with you there, but that doesn't change the broader point - when you sell a company, it is no longer yours, and the interests and politics of a large corp with public shareholders and revenue targets are not those of a smaller acquisition.
I wasn't trying to challenge the broader point. I was trying to challenge the specific claim that some folks are making that Facebook Must ruin Oculus because balance sheet, which is nonsense. Although on re reading your comment I can see I replied too soon and you are not one of those.
> But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.)
Engaging in charity and supporting foundations is not related to the "generosity" of the a corporation (who runs it); charity and foundations can be PR and tax-saving strategies.
Drug cartels engage in charitable donations; that doesn't make them generous.
HSBC (just picked a random one) supports charities. It also launders money for the drug cartels and is generally involved in illegal money transactions.
I can pick virtually any big corporation involved in corruption/crime scandals and I'm pretty sure they routinely make charitable acts and/or have their foundations and as well.
I certainly don't say that any corporation is corrupt, but the link with foundation/charities and morality of a corporation just doesn't exist.
Tax write offs do not work like you seem to imply. There is no net financial gain to any charitable donation . Consider a dollar of profit. If kept on the ledger as profit, a corporation pays around fifty cents of that dollar in tax. If donated that dollar of profit is not taxed, but the corporation now had lost a dollar instead of 50 cents.
See through the cracks: The charity may be owned by a friend of the stockholders or managers. If the donation is reported by some media outlet it may as well recover the money; sometimes is mostly help their own agenda such as...
- A real state company that helps an organization that seeks to prevent the construction of new buildings (because it destroys the forest/parks) but in reality they just want to keep the price of their own stock as high as possible.
- A clothes company that support anti-fur organisations, only because the rival brand is the target of such protesters.
- An alternate reality where Shell supports anti-Exxon campaigns done by Greenpeace.
Why is this a big problem? If your scenario plays out after VR is really viable because of the extra millions that Facebook puts into the product, so be it.
At this point, the awesome feature issue isn't even really on the table based on my understanding. Getting the technology to be stable and solving all the issues with it is the main focus. I don't see Facebook getting in the way of that. If that does become an issue, Facebook will have earned the right after having likely spent millions in the three digit range to get it going.
My fear is that Carmack will know how to make VR really viable but will be prevented from doing this by his new short-sighted managers.
If this happens even a tiny bit, it will kill the passion in the entire team and Facebook's VR will become a gimmick more like Cue-Cat than a world-changing new platform.
Or Carmack and Abrash will say "fuck it" and find an organisation (Valve perhaps :) that won't prevent them.
The technical minds should have a fair chunk of leverage here simply because of how much of the capacity to evolve the product in truly exciting ways will reside in their head.
I can't agree more that developing and delivering competitive VR will be resource intensive over many years, but Oculus had already raised on the order of $100 million, and i'm certain they could have either raised capital for manufacturing or negotiated directly with an existing contract manufacturer for production (many of whom must surely have been beating a path to their door). Is a large tech company really that much better of a bank/VC than a bank or VC? ("don't answer that question")
You mention that Facebook brings "scaling infrastructure experience to the table". While FB's datacenter and network expertise might be very helpful for rolling out any hosted or networked VR applications, I would argue that shipping a hardware product requires a radically different culture compared to shipping web applications. Oculus will be, at best, be Facebook's first big risky learning experience in meeting contemporary expectations for consumer electronics logistics. Even Apple is still learning how to do this, and they have the benefit of shipping dozens of products with similar scale and expectations. I think if Oculus had done things on their own, or with a less brand name partner (Flextronics?) customers would have been willing to cut them much more slack regarding schedule and minor roll out woes as long as the core technology/experience delivered.
Another major downside from such tight ties to Facebook will be convincing other large institutions/platforms (Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo, Google/Android, Apple, hardware vendors) to cooperate or collaborate in building new services. Oculus might be promised autonomy, but would Palmer still be allowed to unilaterally negotiate with Linden Labs, or IBM, or Apple? Seems unlikely.
EDIT TO ADD: The whole acquisition would make a lot more sense if Oculus had suddenly come under direct legal/patent/IP pressure, which could burn through that $100M a lot faster than, eg, the most significant advances in VR in a generation.
On the point about scaling, the knowledge of how to do that lives with people. I seriously doubt that Oculus would have a problem hiring the right people (or raising enough money to do so).
With all due respect to John Carmack and Michael Abrash, this reminds me of a song by Tom Lehrer:
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun."
I'm sure Facebook will give Carmack, and now Abrash, all the tools they need to build their rockets. Where they will aim them is another story, and will be decided by others.
I would agree that this deal is great in terms of making VR happen in the short term - but making it happen by selling it to a giant services company, who can afford to be a loss leader until the competing hardware companies go out of business, seems bad for the overall ecosystem.
Facebook coming to the table gives Oculus a high valuation. They could have easily found other investors with such a high valuation. It's a bit unsettling how quickly this deal went through.
How much autonomy does Oculus have? Can we trust Oculus with privacy? Will Oculus be an open platform?
I think, also, somebody has to be first to bring this technology to the market before it even occurs to others they'd want to compete.
Oculus under Facebook might not bring the finished product most of us were looking for, but having a device that's solved the technological challenges of consumer VR is the heavy lifting. And it puts Facebook in the position of being The Name in consumer VR.
Are they going to alienate that right off the bat by building a walled garden, putting heavy content locks on it, watching everything you do? Or will they do the soft touch of making their helmet the easiest (and perhaps only) way to tie your VR into the Facebook network when you wish, get special savings on new software, offer perks to developers that find Facebook-friendly features for their VR software?
I think if they squeeze too hard people will upgrade right out of them into the competition. Which is sure to follow shortly if the hardware is a massive success and the implementation is driving people away. So, cautiously optimistic.
It doesn't matter how cool the technology is or what it can do, more and more people are becoming disturbed at the now common concept of consumer-as-product for Facebook, Google, et al. Even if they seemed open and friendly at first, I personally wouldn't trust that kind of technology in the hands of Google, Microsoft, or Facebook; end of story.
Definition of creepy: "causing an unpleasant feeling of fear or unease."
What is creepy about finding out what people are into and showing them ads relevant to those things? So many people are claiming that Facebook is creepy, but I just can't see it.
A company keeping a permanent database of my interests, which sites I like to visit and any other information that it can access definitively causes a feeling of unease. What happens to this data if (or when) Facebook goes the way of MySpace? Will they sell it? Are they already selling it? Who could use it against me in the future?
Your sexual habits. Haw many partners you have , how, where, when you have sex with them. Facebook and google log your mobile phone GPS coords.
Your political views.
What your friends thing about you better than you do(They control and store all of their private communications, including phone calls with Skype or Whasapp).
All your family and friends experiences and meetings.
Then they store this info and give it to the powerful companies and governments on demand, like we know via Snowden . For me it is creepy as hell.
If Facebook puts itself to be in this position without possibility of opting out, that is what I hope would trigger people to seek an ethical competitor. And, similarly, that is what I hope would occur to them would be for consumers in aggregate to be an intolerable consequence of forcing on their customers Facebook's ability (and anybody's who could subpoena Facebook) to be privy to this sort of personal information.
I won't buy one of these if it can't be operated without a phone home. I don't mind sacrificing a bit of resolution or refresh rate with a competitor if the alternative is what you say. My hope is that Facebook recognizes that there is a significant market share they'd miss out on if they pushed that point... and, more importantly, that there would actually be a significant market share that they'd miss out on if they pushed that point.
People don't "claim" Facebook is creepy to them, it is. It's like when someone calls another person sexy, and you "just don't see it" -- so? You can ask them more in-depth to understand why it is that way for them, but they don't have to prove anything to you for it to be real, just for you to understand it.
At least Carmack should really to be able to do better than dismissing it as "emotional and tribalistic", and asking for proof for the concerns being valid; that's not now how it works, and this is not a flaw. We can't really prove that having VR is better than not having it either, or that people being clothed and fed is better than naked people starving... doesn't stop us from feeling strongly about such things, nor should it. Communication can help, it is necessary, but proof? Not gonna happen. Let's say someone fears that data silos like Facebook might be really bad in the case of political tyranny -- let them be able to prove that it will be as they fear, then what? We can't prove that fascism is bad, so it gains us nothing.
FWIW, personally I don't find it creepy, I find it lame. My reasons have to do with human dignity, my stance on advertising (described in two words: Bill Hicks), and a certain little quote going something like "they 'trust me'. dumb fucks". I don't like the other big players either, who all want to be everything to everybody -- that is not a business model, that is creepyness made manifest.
Also, I think everybody should have their own homepage and that RSS is fine kthx, but that is neither here nor there.. though anyone who works on things that do not promote that, but offer people virtual "homes" they never fully own, cannot expect me to get excited about their work. Surely you can see how Facebook fits in there for me, when it comes to the web how I love it, they're with the lamers.
And in general I despise this age of coders and businesspeople considered as philosopher kings, and being against things as the default stance has proven to be useful time and time again, sadly. It's not like I have to convince Carmack or anyone that I have valid reasons to dislike VR, especially VR with which Facebook is in any shape associated -- it's the other way around, if they want to sell to me. But I don't see the point anyway, outside of remote surgery; I generally think alienation is the problem, and this is just another way to experience it more deeply, to get even more lost in the confusion of symbols and things.
Sorry for rambling, I would sum my feelings up with this Bill Hicks quote "it's a piece of shit, walk away". Which is not very helpful as an explanation, but for me it hits the nail on the head: I think the problem is not that some of us don't have all the facts; we are looking at the same thing, just coming to vastly different conclusions. Everybody knows what Facebook, advertising and computer games are, and VR is new in practice but very old coffee in terms of science fiction, so even that is not really new. And you know what, to the degree that those things are benign, their makers gladly would accept if some, even large, segments of the population would not ever accept them, right? Carmack asked for testable claims about Facebook being bad, well, here's at least a testable way to see if things are good, from which we can deduce badness to a degree. And Facebook for one fails it hard, failing it is kind of their mission statement.
Facebook tracks everything about you. They track what you like. They track what you don't like. They track what you click. They track what you don't click. They track what you erase in private messages, which means they're monitoring your private messages.
And now we've given facebook new sensors to track. Facebook would love to get the data on peoples head movements. They'll be able to track to the millisecond how much time you spend looking at an in-game ad. They'll be able to track your overall attention span. And those are the least egregious violations of your privacy you can expect from the company; If the company, that looks way too deep into your life already, begins putting something like Facebook Home on your head, I'd say that qualifies as uncanny-valley-scale creepy.
Lets start with the facts that facebook knows someone is gay way before the person comes out. Or that they can predict which people and when will enter relationships ...
"At the end of the day, it takes more than vision and hard work to drive a dream into existence... it takes investment. It takes capital. This is what the deal brings to the table."
If you think capital is scarce--either in general terms or for a project of this calibre-- I think you are making a false assumption. The world has never seen more capital chasing so few ideas so freely as in the past 10 years. Just something to consider, objectively.
Facebook spent 2 billion on this company. Of course they will exert control over them. I'm not sure what Carmack is getting at. Their shareholders will demand it. Facebook is not a charity, it's a business and sooner or later they will have to show a return on this acquisition. It costs money to Dev hardware, If they don't see a return they will pivot this division.
That's not so much of a problem - in the long run Oculus was going to have to become profitable in some way or another, most likely by selling consumer hardware at a profit. The narratives people get afraid of are of Facebook trying to get profit through the methods of a free website: selling advertising and user data.
Given that this is a hardware product, and especially since it's one that will not yet be commoditized when Oculus releases it, I don't see this being a real problem; Apple doesn't need to sell ads or snoop your data to make enormous profits on the iPhone, for example.
To extend the smartphone analogy - I think it's more likely that when there's a popular competitor trying to undercut Oculus on price, someone is going to start trying to sell advertising or user data to pad their margins, but I think that's a pressure that exists independently of Facebook ownership.
$2bn is about 2% of market cap, just slightly more more than Microsoft owns in FB shares. There's some synergy between a VR product and DirectX with FB footing the bill.
Carmack and Abrash are extremely smart, and certainly aware of the privacy implications of Facebook acquiring Oculus.
They know they'll be helping Facebook rape the world's privacy in currently unimaginable ways, but they've got a world-class team doing some serious fucking software engineering, so they don't really care.
Much like for a "quant" on Wall Street, ethical concerns take a back-seat to getting to grapple with lovely, sciency challenges.
Let's take a look:
> I think it is going to be positive, but clearly many disagree.
Positive for you, or positive for the world's sheeple?
> Much of the ranting has been emotional or tribal
Ah, those silly emotional people, group-thinking and being all irrational (unlike Carmack about his technical work). What's there to be emotional about? It's not like there's anything wrong with a police state (like the US or UK) knowing everything about you!
> but I am interested in reading coherent viewpoints about objective outcomes.
He wants us to make a compelling case for how the state knowing absolutely everything about you could possibly be a bad thing. But it has to be objective - you know, exactly like his own view on the matter.
> What are the hazards?
How could Carmack possibly have a clue about the hazards, what with Snowden's revelations and all? It's like, impossible.
> What should be done to guard against them?
How about making sure governments all around the world don't abuse the information they gather on everyone? -Oh wait, you can't.
> What are the tests for failure?
Oh I don't know. Find yourself in a gulag for thinking/saying/doing things the government finds vaguely uncomfortable? --> "Ohhhhhhhh, right. This is a bit of a problem."
Cross posting my comment from the original article:
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Hi John, huge fan of all your work.
I think the biggest issue with the FB acquisition is over one variable: control. The Oculus team has, by definition, relinquished control of their platform to FB. This is not a decision to be brushed aside, as it has some very severe consequences.
Let's for example, consider Oculus' partnership with developers. Prior to the FB deal, Oculus had a direct relationship with developers and would work in tandem with them to guarantee the best user experience. Now, there is a massive Facebook middleman, with all of the decision making power, wedged between Oculus and developers. This is the real reason why Notch and many others have abandoned the platform.
Oculus can give us their word, swear an oath, and cross their hearts. But their destiny is no longer in Palmer's, your's or Michael's hands. It's in Mark Zuckerberg's. And if there is, at any point, any sort of disagreement over the smallest issue, there will be no debate because the Oculus team are now nothing more than employees, and will have to put up or shut up when it comes to crucial decisions.
Of course, as long as there are no problems, and everything is rosy then all is well. But the second rough seas are encountered and tough decisions need to be made, I fear that the Oculus team will understand that they've made a serious mistake by relinquishing control of their destiny to Facebook.
If the Oculus team was short on cash, I'm sure there would have been a great many investors willing to pour additional money into the venture at very generous valuations. This is because Oculus was a darling of the industry, with legends such as yourself on board. The developer community knew that you would not compromise on the experience, and because you answered to no one but the Oculus team and your investors, you were free to make the Oculus experience the best it could possibly be.
Personally, I have watched many interviews with yourself describing the challenges of the Oculus and how you are working on overcoming them. I was sold based on your vision, determination, and most importantly, the freedom and control to deliver the best experience possible. I cannot help but feel that the FB deal has put a sword of Damocles over your heads, as the technical leads will always be the first to have to accept defeat when faced with executive meddling on critical decisions.
I would point to Elon Musk, and how he has maintained control of Tesla and SpaceX, not because it was the correct financial decision, but because as a product company he would have been doomed if non-technical executives began vetoing his critical design decisions. Sadly, this latter scenario is the one I believe Oculus has put itself in. I truly hope you can weather these storms as they arise, but history and experience tell me it will be extremely difficult.
I don't know John Carmack's financial background, so what I'm about to say might be totally wrong.
Your comparison to Elon Musk is kind of odd. Elon Musk's first company sold to a larger company for a giant pile of money. Actually even his second company sold for a giant pile of money. It appears (at least from my perspective) that only after he sold two companies for billions of dollars did he follow the route we see with Tesla & SpaceX of not selling.
And where are those products today? Elon Musk has openly said that PayPal has become a disappointment since he sold it.
Relinquishing control of design decisions for a product company is suicide. Product companies make things whose functions are the selling point. Tesla, SpaceX and Oculus all fall into this category.
Ah yes, sorry. I should have been a bit more verbose in my response.
I totally agree with you about the long term health of the product/company itself. I have no doubt that they could have raised capital by other means, and continued to do cool things for VR.
What I don't agree with is the comparison to Elon Musk, because Elon Musk already sold companies for billions of dollars. When someone offers billions of dollars, that changes things for a lot of people. Elon Musk did exactly what Oculus is doing right now. He sold, because that's a hell of a lot of money. In some respects, it has allowed him to do whatever the hell he damn well pleases, to great effect (launching space rockets and making incredible cars).
So I understand why the fan base of VR & Oculus is upset, but I cannot at all fault them for selling, because giant piles of money, holy crap.
From what I gather, Musk had aspirations to make advancements in renewable energy and space travel from has early as his time in college, but obviously those industries have rather large barriers to entry. So I believe Zip2 and Paypal were acting as stepping stones so he could build up capital/experience before he could move onto his true passion.
Virtual reality has a low enough barrier to entry that the kickstarter and existing investments had already solved that problem. And as far as I'm aware, VR are some of the highest aspirations held by the Oculus team, take this recent quote from Palmer Luckey for example:
> "I’m obsessed with VR. I spend every day pushing further, and every night dreaming of where we are going. Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined we’d come so far so fast."
So I personally see the comparison with SpaceX/Tesla as a fairer comparison than Musk's first two businesses.
Well, the point is elon has made his fu money. Its easy for him to say it was a mistake.
You know what. Let,palmer do the same. Let him get his millions here. Maybe he will start another company in the future and call oculus deal a mistake. Fair game?
What I don't get about the idea that Oculus could have sought investment elsewhere - Who do you imagine would have given them similar sums of money without exerting pressure and control? There's pretty much no such beast.
One thing we know about FB is that Zuckerberg is willing to look at a longer horizon than most investors. It's quite likely FB is among the least pressuring investors they could have found.
You are describing in a great many words how a business acquisition works. I am sure you don't mean to, but this comes off as incredibly patronizing. Do you really think JC doesn't understand this?
But if you have investors then they can and did have control. Just because a company didn't sell itself doesn't mean there isn't someone else calling the shots.
I have to agree with Carmack here. Companies, governments or individuals having lots of data isn't a bad thing in its self. It's what they do with that data that matters, and what they do can be positive as well as negative.
This is not to say that we should blindly trust data-holders to behave responsibly. We should watch them very closely! The recent kerfuffle about Microsoft reading a blogger's mail is a good example: MS took an action many people felt was wrong, it got widely publicized, and MS decided they weren't going to do it again, and made a policy change to codify that decision. What was a grey area became a bright line that they've vowed not to cross.
The existence of big data is new, and our civilization hasn't figured out how to deal with it yet. I'm confident that we will figure it out, and the good that comes from it will be much greater than the evil.
Not technically wrong, but it's a bad show to introduce that risk. I say this a lot, but - IT ethics is like medical ethics: you're obligated to protect your clients with expertise regarding things they don't understand. Personal information needs to have strong guarantees of segmentation and authority controls. That's not an open question; it used to be called "good system administration."
There's no middle ground on this. Either you're doing your job as an IT professional, or you're exposing users to risk from data-sale, breach exposure, or government overreach.
So it's our duty as IT professionals to prevent people from using IT?
The services that large-scale IT provides could not exist without gathering the volume of data they do. Google couldn't provide relevant search results with just an index of the web, it also relies on vast amounts of data about user behaviour. The same is true of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
It's non-sensical to talk about risk without talking about the actual scenarios you're worried about. How bad are they? How probable are they? What can we do to reduce the harm and/or likelihood of harm? How much, if at all, will those measures reduce the benefits of the services based on big data? That's the discussion we should be having. Most of the "concern" about big data boils down to an appeal to emotion: "Just think what they could do with all that information!"
> So it's our duty as IT professionals to prevent people from using IT?
Yes, within reason. I advise people not to use Facebook, and I spend a fair amount of working hours on alternatives to Google's app infrastructure. For the grayer areas like improving search, you deal with complicated questions and push the industry to innovate on effective distributed designs. You're making a big assumption saying that collecting a centralized database on users is the only way make good search results. It's certainly one of the easiest ways...
> It's non-sensical to talk about risk without talking about the actual scenarios you're worried about. How bad are they? How probable are they?
If you don't have personal control over your information, detailed knowledge of how the information is used, or the ability to revoke access, you basically have to assume the probability is 100%. There's barely any legal framework in place on the issue, and so we're left with social pressure and business ethics.
Can you really not guess at a negative outcome for personal information collection and passive surveillance?
Can you really not specify the negative outcomes you're trying to prevent? You're accusing me (and most of the members of this forum) of a moral failing, an abrogation of our responsibility to the world. That's a serious accusation, and I'm taking it seriously.
If you're right, then I should go into the next room and tell my wife not to post any more pictures of our daughter to Facebook. I should tell my mother that she won't be seeing any more pictures of her grand-daughter, and we're going to have to stop having video chats on Skype. Of course, if I do that, they're going to want to know why. What should I tell them? It better be good, because if not, they'll think I'm just being a jerk, and they'll be right.
I agree with you that Facebook has data that could be used in undesirable ways. But it's already being used, right now, on a massive scale, in ways that are clearly and demonstrably desirable. I think the best way to live up to our responsibility is to do two things:
• clearly enumerate the scenarios we want to avoid, the reasons why, and advocate for public and private policies that prevent them
• be on the lookout for unintended consequences and negative effects that we didn't anticipate, so that we can prevent them from occurring on a large scale
Ok, that's fair. Here's a list of things that worry me, specifically related to Facebook, but they can apply in other cases.
- Private messages. These can be really dangerous for personal relationships and community standing if leaked.
- Profiling data: friendship graphs, location pings, browsing history, political alignment, sexuality, religion. Can be used to make targeted attacks on individuals by predicting their behaviors; to track an individual's influence in communities; to create credible misinformation about the target or their community; to make strategic decisions that will minimize a person's/community's influence in the outcome (for instance, politically).
- Images. Can be used with automated systems to deanonymize crowds and thus passively surveil.
The issue isn't so much zero-sum. I'm not worried about a sudden crackdown on citizens that's orchestrated through this data, because there are other more relevant safeguards (like cultural health and the functioning political process). I'm more worried about the value of the information as intelligence in political strategy.
Anthony Weiner's embarrassing blow-up is a good extreme example - not that he was targeted (it appeared to have been self-inflicted) but it shows what embarrassing information can do to a politician. Facebook has that in spades, and I'm certain there will be politicians looking to buy.
The more subtle applications are more troubling. Applied well, the dataset could be queried for potential or active dissidents and used to discredit them. It wouldn't be hard, either. Make an anonymous tip to someone's SO that they cheated once, perhaps - if their marriage blows up publicly, that's a success. Think of a pastor or a CEO, in that case.
This sort of thing doesn't happen yet (I hope) but information "wants to be free," which is why you can't let it out once. As I suggested before, there's system breaches, unethical sale of data (perhaps even by employees) government mandates. It's not like any of it is unheard of even before the big data era. And even if most citizens are not a target, by complying with the arrangement, we endanger the people who could protect us by dissenting. The health of our cultures and our republics relies on distributed pockets of inalienable authority - in this case, over private information.
Should you stop using Facebook? I don't know, it's all about trade-offs. I do my best, but I've still got a gmail account and a linode setup, the former because I'm more worried about system breaches with my email, the latter because I can't afford dedicated hosting. I don't like either situation. You can call me a bit hypocritical for that too, but the situation is partially social, so I advocate for change as hard as I can.
Lately I've been thinking the best strategy possible would be to call for Facebook to release self-hosting software that's still compatible with their network. But there's also the possibility of somebody creating a really superior alternative, and that would be nice too. That's what I work on, but it's really hard to beat the featureset.
A very simple reason is the difference in business model between an hardware company, and a ad-based web site.
Everyone doubts a single company can sustain the two in parallel.
Occulus original vision is to focus on the hardware, sell it with a margin and keep improving at it ( and the software on top). And have an ecosystem of service providers using your device. Much like Apple.
Facebook wants to create free services that gets as much information from their user as possible, and create new features ( or buy concurrents) only when they see them slip away.
It's pretty easy to predict where the two won't match.
I share some of your misgivings about companies "existing and operating only to be acquired". I am a true believer in market economies, and the magic of trade being a positive sum game is most obvious with repeated transactions at a consumer level. Company acquisitions, while still (usually) being a trade between willing parties that in theory leaves both better off, have much more of an element of speculation rather than objective assessment of value, and it definitely feels different.
There is a case to be made for being like Valve, and trying to build a new VR ecosystem like Steam from the ground up. This is probably what most of the passionate fans wanted to see. The difference is that, for years, the industry thought Valve was nuts, and they had the field to themselves. Valve deserves all their success for having the vision and perseverance to see it through to the current state.
VR won't be like that. The experience is too obviously powerful, and it makes converts on contact. The fairly rapid involvement of the Titans is inevitable, and the real questions were how deeply to partner, and with who.
Honestly, I wasn't expecting Facebook (or this soon). I have zero personal background with them, and I could think of other companies that would have more obvious synergies. However, I do have reasons to believe that they get the Big Picture as I see it, and will be a powerful force towards making it happen. You don't make a commitment like they just did on a whim.
I wasn't personally involved in any of the negotiations -- I spent an afternoon talking technology with Mark Zuckerberg, and the next week I find out that he bought Oculus.
I did skip the data mining issue, mostly because I just can't get very worked up about it.
I'm not a "privacy is gone, get over it" sort of person, and I fully support people that want remain unobserved, but that means disengaging from many opportunities. The idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me.
Being data driven is a GOOD thing for most companies to be. Everyone cheers the novel creative insight and bold leadership that leads to some successes, and tut tuts about companies ending up poorly by blindly following data, but cold analysis of the data is incredibly important, and I tend to think the world will be improved with more and better data analysis.
I have never felt harmed by data mining, and I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this? Be specific.
My biggest worry is the destructive effect the acquisition had on the community. Many developers feel that their expectations were betrayed.
And of course, the unnoticeably slow corruption through bureaucracy and politics which inevitably seeps in as acquisitions get merged into the greater fold.
This thread prompted me to write more about this, so I wrote a letter to Carmack (no response yet, though): https://medium.com/p/f8589a747d11
I recently bought a mechanical keyboard (razer). It has programmable macro keys, but in order to install the driver I have to create an account on the manufacturer's site and log in before the installer will continue. It's complete crap and I will never buy anything from that manufacturer again.
Am I going to have to log in to facebook to use the occulus headset or install the software? Probably.
I mentioned the story about Razer to give an example of shitty things companies do to leverage a user base.
G+ and YouTube. Microsoft and Skype. Anything Apple.
Even without a suggestion that this might happen with Facebook and Oculus, it happens all over the industry. There might not be a suggestion of it, but there is definitely a fear of it.
The only thing that I really don't like about the acquisition is that it is certain to delay the consumer product by some significant time. The shot that Sony fired over their bow (almost into their ship) made them fully understand that their time was up. Their planned time frame wouldn't work in competition with Sony because their pockets weren't deep enough to technologically one-up Sony. To come out with something at best on par but further down the road than Sony would sink them like a stone.
Now those pockets are deep enough and there will be substantial delay as they order the development of new tech and cost reduction engineering to create something truly competitive. This is not speculative, they have stated that they are going to do that but without mention of the time it will take.
This may be good in the long run but I think the run-up to their product has been far, far too long already. What this all means is I want one, I want it now and it just got further away, perhaps much further.
Well, I guess would only use the Rift if there are open source Linux drivers in the mainline kernel. I guess such drivers would only land in mainline if they are technologically and morally ok (then the driver is really just a 3D display driver and has no usage data collection function etc.).
> there will be a plethora of information to mine along with the ability and intent to do it. It is infinitely easier to mine data in a completely simulated reality - Facebook will know where you’re looking, what you’re doing, and how long you do it.
Free software is the solution. I've never been that interested in Oculus so I'm not aware if the device is flashable or how much control a developer has when writing software for it.
If Facebook treats it as they've treated some of their hardware work and initiatives, we may find we can live with it.
If they treat it as they've treated their "platform", we are likely to have problems.
Which way will it go? Nobody knows...
I think most of us feel that the technology itself needs to be "open" and platform agnostic. We've just observed a major change that places this in question. Concern is justified.
The FB acquisition seems to imply that the deeply talented Oculus team will help pioneer VR as a new mechanism for social interactions online. Call me a simpleton, but I'm more interested in Carmack et al revolutionizing gaming. Maybe that will still happen, but this acquisition makes me less interested in VR, for the time being.
Hey, with the Facebook acquisition it's even more sci-fi than ever. What's more cyberpunk than amazing virtual reality technology that's owned and controlled by a corporation with more money than some countries, whose purpose is to gather information about every aspect of its users lives in order to sell them junk?
We all bring our own perspectives and experience to our day to day lives and our perspectives, and so I make no bones here about the following being the fruits of my own perspective. Please keep that in mind as you read the following and judge its content.
I myself have recently undergone the acquisition of my company, a private company that was well regarded in the field it was operated, by a large multi-billion mult-national. When I read Carmack's comments I feel pulled in two different directions.
On the one hand, I am old enough to have grown up with Castle Wolfenstein and Doom being formative experiences in my life on the computer, and my life in general. I can still remember downloading to the first Quake shareware, playing the original Team Fortress, and installing Navy Seals Quake long before its creator had moved onto Counter-Strike. And so Carmack is like a hero to me, he really did make an impact on my life growing up.
On the other hand, I see in all of his comments the same sort of sentiment that I saw in all of the upper management and senior members of my firm. They all expressed the exact same sorts of sentiments, that the acquisition would allow our company to reach the next level, giving us greater capital to expand our reach. Of course, now that push has come to shove, actually getting some of that money to spend is proving to be a bit more difficult than they had initially imagined or been promised. It turns out that our parent company was perfectly happy to acquire us for the market position that we help and the money that we could bring in without a substantial capital infusion. I know that the immediate argument will be that facebook will be totally different and will no doubt fund oculus to their heart's content, but I guess it is my cynicism showing when I hear these pronouncements through the same filter I now apply to announcements from our own parent company.
Anyway, as I said, we all view our lives through our own filter, and maybe I am totally swayed in my views. But I can't help but seeing the same sort of naive optimism in Carmack that permeated our organization before it came down to dollars and cents, and cheques had to be signed. And maybe, just like some in our senior management, Carmack is now older and less idealistic, and reflects this is the same way that some in my firm did, in their ability to say one thing publicly, and know something else in their heart, as long as the zeroes added up properly. Something funny happens as you get older, I feel it happening in myself, maybe you just don't feel as ready to go out on your shield. But I got the feeling from at least a few people in our acquisition that they knew how things would go, and were happy to say differently because it would work out better for them.
I don't know where John's head is, and so I can't charitably assume negative things, but then again I don't think assuming the best is any more honest or charitable, especially where facebook is concerned. I hope for the future of VR, but when I read the hopelessly positive and/or naive visions of this acquisition I can't help but asking myself "What do they know that I don't?" How can these people be that optimistic, unless they aren't actually that positive. We'll see how it goes, but I don't begrudge anyone feeling pessimistic at this point, especially given the history of tech acquisitions. We'll see how it goes, but in my heart of hearts, I hope for another Oculus and another Palmer, maybe slightly less focused on the bottom line, bringing the promise of VR to us all.
In my opinion, everything that facebook says is true, today, but could be different tomorrow.
Like a marriage, when you are young and life is good is very different from when you get older, and life gets tough.
Today facebook is incredible rich because they convinced millions of people to buy shares of the company. They promised a good return from their investment.
Being rich they could buy Whassapp, Instagram and respect them like in when you are in love everything is seen with rose colored glasses.
Now, when investors get nervous because facebook profit does not grow enough, their market sinks, the Federal Reserve stops pumping the stock market, or the good people inside starts cashing out their money and leaving.... then suddenly life becomes different.
On the one hand, I don't see how Oculus could have survived competing in the consumer market against the likes of Sony and (eventually) Microsoft without large-scale financial backing. On the other hand, Facebook is not a consumer product company, and Oculus has never successfully brought a tangible consumer product to market. I'm not convinced at this point that money is enough to make them successful, but it'll be interesting.
Pay back all kickstarter contributions. Let carmack build a rocket and admit beeing puny sellouts. Facebook has a record of running a php app and bad policy making. If this isn't about money then it's about carmack thinking Zuckerberg has a sweet ass. Orrrr Facebook was the only place that allowed carmack to open source all things.. Dream on.
My only gripe with the sale to Facebook is that it was originally funded by contributions on Kickstarter, and those "funders" will get nothing in return. I just don't see gamers and developers supporting Facebook as much as they supported Oculus... which makes it seem like they did something sleazy by selling to FB.
I backed them on kickstarter and got my dev kit as a result. I'm really unhappy about FB being the first to bring VR to the masses, but it doesn't have anything to do with kickstarter.
This is not entirely true. In a market like ours we often can vote with our wallet. There is not an obvious product here that we can or can't buy or use but I would not say that we are powerless.
He's a CTO and he finds it out like that? There's something I don't understand.