I think Zuckerberg might have read Snow Crash a few too many times.

It's just like Google. The founders run these companies like their own high tech playgrounds. Their core businesses are profitable enough and investors ready enough that they can afford to make terrible decisions for decades. See, for example, Yahoo!

Reality, virtual or otherwise, isn't intruding into Silicon Valley these days. We're about 9 months from the next crash, and it can't happen soon enough.
No, the headset isn't worth 2 billion and neither is Facebook. Tulip mania is in full swing, again.

Maybe they like it as a standalone business? Maybe they see the technology as being something that could produce a competitor to Google Glass?

Isn't this an information free think piece?

$2 Billion.

I wonder how few people are getting a share of that?

I also wonder how many people in poverty you could really help out with two billion dollars?

Zzzzzzzzz... . . .

Slog drinking game rule #12: Every time Paul Constant says "think piece".

Regardless of whether people ever end up wearing goggles that project images onto their eyes -- something that has been proposed, prototyped and deployed, without business success, for two decades -- Mr. Zuckerberg has just bought himself a hardware division, doing state of the art device making, for a very, very low price. Their engineers could end up making goggles. Or facial recognition. Or motion detectors. Or mobile devices. Or ...

It's a superior example of lateral thinking.

information-free think pieces make me dread stuff like this.

"Why Facebook will bleh bleh your bleh"

"How Facebook's VR will bleh"

"Top 5 Ways Facebook Will Leverage Oculus Rift"

Zuckerberg seems to desperately want to keep Facebook cool even if it means throwing billions of dollars away in vain to do it. It's the only thread that really ties together the acquisition of Instagram, Whatsapp and now Oculus.

The meltdown on reddit is hi-larious.

Poor and middle class people always worried about what rich folk are doing.

2 Billion is cheap compared to Instagram.

@14 -- it's good to keep tabs on the folks who's factories we'll have to sweat and toil in, or who's wars we'll have to fight and die in.