Zuckerberg dismisses Microsoft and Sony competition

As the industry balks at Facebook’s recent US$2 billion acquisition of virtual-reality firm Oculus, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it crystal clear he isn’t worried.

Speaking during a conference call following the announcement, the company founder dismissed Sony and Microsoft as competition in the market.

Specifically alluding to PlayStation and Xbox in the virtual reality space, Zuckerberg didn’t mince with his words, saying: “What we’ve seen is the Oculous product that they have now is way ahead of anything else that’s out there.

“Sony, I think, has demo’d something very early. Microsoft hasn’t even gotten to the point where they have anything to demo yet.

“Not only that but the team is way ahead in terms of just having so many talented people at Oculus, that we feel good about that.”

In order to build a huge computing platform, Zuckerberg claims there are a “bunch of important use cases that you need to support.”

“We’ve measured this more with mobile, but what we see is that about 40 percent of the time that people spend overall is in gaming,” he adds.

“And about 40 percent is also spent in social communications. About half of that is in Facebook, which is nice.

“What we basically believe is that unlike the Microsoft or Sony pure console strategies, if you want to make this a real computing platform, you need to fuse both of those things together.”

Will Facebook’s US$2 billion acquisition of Oculus be a success?