Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg genuinely believes they have a game changer on their hands with Oculus Rift, the virtual reality hardware slated for next year. However, Zuckerberg expanded on his opinions regarding the potential sales of the Oculus Rift during Facebook’s Q3 2015 earnings call.
Zuckerberg indicated that they feel virtual reality could be “the next big computing platform.” He seemed, though, to ask for realistic expectations from investors when it comes to sales out of the gate.
“Virtual reality has the potential to be the next computing platform that changes all our lives, [but] it’s important to also recognize that this will grow slowly.”
Zuckerberg even went on to talk about the early world of smartphones. He pointed specifically to BlackBerry and Palm Treo as the first to the smartphone market around 2003. To “kind of give a sense of the time frame we’re thinking about,” Zuckerberg compared the future sales of the Oculus Rift to the original “hundreds of thousands of units” sold for those first smartphones.
I think Zuckerberg is right to temper expectations here. I have no doubt that virtual reality could really be the next big thing, but it takes a lot for the first company out of the gate to also be the one that completely redefines a platform. Look at Palm now, right?
What do you think? Will the Oculus Rift explode to huge sales out of the gate, or will it take time for this VR thing to catch on?
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