
Oculus and the Rift are (probably) dead - drzaiusapelord
https://annoyedadmin.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/oculus-and-the-rift-are-probably-dead/
======
vacri
_Loyalty lost is rarely regained. Now they’ll have to work twice as hard to
remain credible in the industry_

This happened to the OLPC. It was the darling of open-source fans who were
scrambling over each other to write free software for it, who would nearly
fight each other to play with it at conferences, attracted by its open-to-all
ethos. Then they did the deal with MS ("for the children") and the buzz almost
literally disappeared overnight. The army of developers willing to create
content for free for the machine disappeared.

And when the buzz disappeared, the tech blogs stopped reporting on it, because
no-one in the tech space was interested in it anymore. And the mainstream
press was no longer interested because the tech blogs weren't. It was quite
educational to watch the nosedive of the OLPC. There were other criticisms
causing issues for the OLPC, it wasn't just the loss of tech buzz, but buzz is
a major contributor to saleability, as is an active and expansive dev
community.

------
cup
How many hours has it been since the announcment. I hope you save this post
and review it in a few years. Perhaps it will give you a moment to ponder over
your character.

Edit: To qualify, by character I mean its easy to be critical and negative,
perhaps that has a negative effect on ones life or outlook.

~~~
WiseWeasel
His character? Did you read the post? The author raises some interesting
points about the competitiveness of Oculus' latest development hardware in the
face of Sony's recent Morpheus product announcement. You have to admit the
timing is suspicious.

~~~
gwern
No, he doesn't make any interesting points at all. He says the latest devkit
was a disaster. (Was it?) He says that the sale proves that Oculus has failed
utterly and can't compete with Morpheus and they failed to solve the motion
problem etc etc. (Wow, we're really confident we know everything about
something which just got some press and few people have actually tried, and
apparently we can't think of _any_ reason the Oculus shareholders might accept
a few billion bucks, no, it _must_ be that they are failing hard and are rats
scampering off a sinking ship, we've thought of and carefully dismissed all
other possibilities...)

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sdoowpilihp
This article is littered with half baked, border line conspiracy theories.
Worse, it's on the front page of HN. This is probably the reason I frequent
other sites a lot more than here now.

It's okay to be against an acquisition, but try to back it up with facts and
critical thought.

~~~
idlewan
Facts are not always available to us, especially when there is a lack of
information / communication / when we discuss unprovable things like human
motivations.

Who knows what the Oculus people are actually thinking? That's why we usually
make hypothesis and conjectures: we can't prove it wrong or right, we still
think something's fishy. I however agree that the tone of the article sounds
too certain.

------
mcphage
> A lot of investors and enthusiasts saw Sony’s Morpheus as a potential Rift
> killer.

So this is going to be an expensive additional add-on for the PS4, that would
somehow have killed the Rift? Optional console add-ons rarely gain any
traction, and while Sony made a great demo unit, they have plenty of money to
make powerful, fancy prototypes. There's no way of knowing what the actual
consumer units will be like until they actually create a product out of it.

Oculus started basic and is improving because that's all they could afford to
do, given their need to release actual usable, mass produced hardware to
backers. Sony started huge, and now they'll see how they can distill that down
to a mass-producible item. And that probably won't be for a year or two.

So yeah, they have competition now, but Oculus did not sell because they were
afraid of a shiny demo. It's not a product yet, and there's no guarantee that
it ever will be.

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EpaL
Why do you assume the product is no good simply because they sold out?

I prefer to look at as they simply didn't have deep enough pockets to go up
against the likes of Sony and no doubt Microsoft and Valve in the near future.
Being acquired by a giant like Facebook - as distasteful as it may seem at the
outset - gives them the capital they need to execute on their vision and not
have to worry so much about being buried by the gaming titans.

This was a strategic play to keep Oculus alive, not to kill it dead.

------
busterarm
The most interesting part of the article to me was the second to last
paragraph.

We've been down this road with VR technology before in the mid-90s. Our
enthusiasm is way ahead of anything that's ever been delivered on.

Just to salt the wound a little more, I'll leave this here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8LYrF2k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8LYrF2k)

------
baby
Just wait a few days and this back lashing will be over.

