Over on Mastodon, Steve Barnes wrote some excellent comments related to my post yesterday.
He made me realize there is something very central to my post that I completely failed to make clear:
Why do I make it sound like Meta created the Quest when it was Oculus who did so much of the essential technical work before Meta bought them?
The answer is that I do not think a headset like the Quest 2 I own would be here on the sofa with me had there not been a Meta to buy Oculus and push the technology out to people.
Oculus was definitely much more essential for the the VR tech we have today than Meta is, but without spreading it wide, getting devices made, and plugging away at polishing the software it would not have become a neat wireless package I could pick up in a store, set up in minutes (modulo Meta accounts), and buy games for without being technical.
I wonder if the ability to push things along for a while is not a bit under-rated in tech today? Many things do not need radical changes every year (or every six minutes), they just need to settle, gradually spread, and get polished and well maintained.
Google or Microsoft - to just pick some major companies out of thin air - have released and dropped more products than I can count in the time the Quest line has been around, several of them VR adjacent. They could have scaled and manufactured and distributed for a while, but they and their mindset could not have brought the Quest 2 to me and kept it updated.
The one company I could think of as a possible alternative would be Valve. They can definitely do things over long periods of time. Hey, they even make hardware, some of which is for VR! And they are well known enough to me that I could concievably have bought a wireless headset from them had it existed.
Somehow, I feel like Valve would have been a bit too leisurly to get it done though. Would they have pushed enough? Is their share of the current VR market a sign that they are not hungry enough to build a Quest-sized presence?
Perhaps. But on the other hand I would never in a million years have guessed Meta would be this good to VR had it not happened.
Kudos to everyone who is pushing something along even though it is not the hype of the moment. Almost everything is not.