Yahoo offered yahoo 2Bill for Facebook. Everyone thought it was ridiculous at the time for him to refuse.
Minecraft Creator Kills Oculus Rift Plans Because Facebook Creeps Him Out http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2014/03/25/minecraft-creator-kills-oculus-rift-plans-because-facebook-creeps-him-out/
Open and connected world Open and connected world Open and connected world What the f does this even mean? So annoying to hear them repeat this crap over and over. Here's what it means: we need as many users as constantly interacting with our services in as many ways as possible to generate the most advertising dollars per user as possible to maximize our share price and valuation. We're not exactly sure how to do that, but we know trends change all the time in the tech world and are scared ****less that we might become increasingly less relevant to younger users, so in addition to pouring craptons on money into our own apps and clones, we are spending billions to acquire companies that might be helpful!!
What the hell did they actually buy! For $2 billion they haven't even got a finished product really. That is crazy!
Investing in R&D and integrating with complementary products to meet fiduciary obligations, sounds pretty ****ed.
smart of Facebook to buy other things, as there main service seems like something that could snowball out of use quickly if people grow tired of it or some better thing comes along
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift Basically, a Kickstarter project (started less than 2 years ago) for a VR headset that ended up being very successful and seemed to be gaining steam. I'm sure a lot of companies could have given them big paydays, though I guess it depends on who actually thought the company was worth ~$2B. MS might be developing their own VR tech, and perhaps it is more cost efficient to go that route. There has been some speculation on that for a while, though there is some confusion about whether people are just misunderstanding what their fortaleza project is.
people will never leave their homes.. we'll all be fat in the real world and healthy in the virtual reality world!
With a 100+ billion valuation, they have more money than they need to use. This is like Google buying that thermostat company or that cybernetics company. So it's not only FB that's bubbly, all sili valley companies and VCs are wondering what to do with their mountains of cash while deeply aware that their current streams of revenue can dry up in a blackberry minute
The thing is these companies are so flush with cash. What do you expect them to do with the cash. These companies aren't oil companies with huge CapEx. Their capex is the talent(people) so they need to make sure they invest a ton buying up these companies that have the potential to make the next big thing. Also these companies get goodwill for these transaction. So they can write down the goodwill in the future and lower their taxes. So effectively the government is subsidizing the overall purchase price.
The question is why is Apple not buying some of these companies? They buying smaller companies related to iPhone/iPad features (fingerprint sensors, etc), but some of the companies that Apple should be interested have not been gobbled up by them. Apple has somewhere between $150-$175 BILLION in Cash available.
Apple doesn't have a visionary anymore. Jobs could see things coming years away and knew how to execute. Right now all apple is doing is solidifying their app store dominance and trying to keep companies. They are like cigarette companies at this point. Nothing new, working hard to keep customers
This will prove to be a poor acquisition imo. Oculus Rift is the catchy relatively small studio making headlines but... 1. the tech isn't new and there are mature products engineered by established companies with more capital and a history of doing hardware. Historically, the first to stick its head out in new tech performs poorly. 2. what's the synergy with FB's current products? Whatsapp at least made sense. OR is about gaming, virtual worlds (a very distant strategy, think 2nd Life), and pron. 3. OR acquisition doesn't seem to have defensive value. 4. FB has a poor report card when it comes to how it utilizes and integrates acquisitions. 5. Bringing an "indie" effort under the FB umbrella is a fast way for your marketing efforts to take a nosedive.
