Facebook multi-billion Oculus deal raises questions

NEW YORK – Facebook’s latest multibillion dollar acquisition of virtual reality headset maker Oculus is prompting some people to wonder if CEO Mark Zuckerberg is already living in an alternate reality.

Longtime technology analyst Roger Kay wonders whether Zuckerberg “is nuts” for agreeing to pay $2 billion for Oculus less than five weeks after inking a deal to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion.

Oculus, which got its start on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, doesn’t have a consumer product on the market, just the promise of bulky virtual reality goggles that have generated huge buzz in the video gaming community.

Zuckerberg, for his part, sees long-term implications in the technology, for communication, entertainment and beyond. He was right about mobile, and he’s created the world’s biggest online social network.

So, is he looney, or visionary?

“Mobile is the platform of today and now we’re starting to also get ready for the platforms of tomorrow. To me, by far the most exciting future platform is around vision or modifying what you see to create augmented and immersive experiences,” Zuckerberg said on a conference call Tuesday discussing the deal. “Today’s acquisition is a long-term bet on the future of computing. I believe Oculus can be one of the platforms of this future.”

Facebook’s investors seem to think Oculus’s promise is too far off. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social networking company’s stock fell 7 per cent on Wednesday to close at $60.38.

Beyond sticker shock, the WhatsApp and Oculus deals – along with the Facebook’s spurned offer to buy SnapChat for $3 billion — have raised questions about Facebook’s ability to innovate on its own. Some of the company’s most high-profile products, such as the SnapChat-like Poke, the messaging service Facebook Messenger and Home, have flopped. The jury’s still out on Paper, a stand-alone app that lets users read news, Facebook feeds and more.

“Facebook I don’t think has the best innovation strategy,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau. “So far it’s been ‘move fast and break things.’ Move fast is good, but break thinks, may not be.”

Blau calls the Oculus acquisition “kind of out of left field.”

“We have always thought about experience as a focus of virtual reality,” he says. “Certainly it can be social, but we have not thought about it as a core social experience.”

That’s not to say it can’t work. There were questions about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram back when it offered $1 billion for the photo-sharing app (the final purchase price was $715 million) in April 2012 – and Instagram “turned out fine,” Blau points out. Facebook said Tuesday that Instagram has 200 million users, up from 30 million at the time it agreed to buy the company.

Oculus is a horizontal acquisition for Facebook, which means it lets the company expand into a new space, rather than grow its core business. It’s a strategy employed by Amazon.com Inc., whose businesses range from online retail to video streaming to tablets, and Google Inc., which recently bought high-tech thermostat and smoke-detector maker Nest Labs for $3.2 billion.

© 2014 The Canadian Press