[eldavido]

So much this.

I saw facebook's earnings last quarter and my jaw dropped. 40% increase in revenue since same quarter last year. Then I took a look at their quarterly report, and the entire thing -- and I mean, like 99% of it -- is about ads. MAU, DAU, publisher and inventory growth, top-level organizational goals about getting more marketers on the platform, etc. The only other two revenue sources they have are hardware sales and payments, and they didn't even break out how much either of those businesses made apart from the broader facebook advertising business. It became extremely clear reading the report that ads is where the focus, attention, and money are going in the company.

I guess Oculus is going to be a giant ad business. Either that, or fb is going to pull off a major win against the innovator's dilemma, where they get so focused on ads that that focus chokes other initiatives within the company.

I don't doubt Oculus (as well as Messenger) have a ton of ad inventory in front of them. But I think it's a mistake to think fb cares about the hardware per se; they don't, it's all just a doorway to their platform.

[L_Rahman]

And even if they try to build a premium hardware division with Oculus, it's unlikely to work. Culture is incredibly sticky and companies rarely succeed in building products that are orthogonal to their culture.