It’s understandable that Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is not used to small numbers- as founder of one of the world’s most ubiquitous and popular sites with well over a billion members, anything less than a few hundred million may seem like petty change to him. That said, he may be overshooting with Oculus Rift, and his expectations for it. That, or he is grossly overestimating the market’s readiness to accept such a product.
Speaking to investors about Oculus Rift, and its potential as a computing platform, an ecosystem, and a business stream for Facebook during an earnings report, Zuckerberg has reportedly expressed a desire for high penetration of the device.
“It’s hard to predict exactly but I don’t think it’s going to get to 50 million or 100 million units in the next few years,” he told investors according to The Guardian. “So that will take a few cycles of the device to get there.
“And then when you get to that scale, that’s when it starts to be interesting as a business in terms of developing out the ecosystem. So when I’m talking about that as a ten year thing, it’s building the first set of devices and building the audience and the ecosystem around that until it eventually becomes a business.”
Well… I don’t know. I think there is some interest there, but honestly, I don’t see Oculus Rift, or just Virtual Reality as it stands now, really, catching on on that scale. It’s just not going to happen, in my opinion.