"Our overall vision for the space is that we will be completely ubiquitous in killer apps, have very strong coverage in platform services (like Google has with Android) and will be strong enough in hardware and systems to at a minimum support our platform services goals, and at best be a business itself"
- Zuckerberg's 2015 VR letter
That’s almost nine years ago. He may or may not have changed his mind.
It would help if Meta said something about that. Ideally for potential third party hardware manufacturers, they’d promise to leave the hardware market once a vibrant ecosystem exists.
Defining “vibrant” then would be hard to impossible, though. The edge cases are easy, but uninteresting. If none of the others are making money on hardware there is no vibrant system. If multiple other parties are making money, they probably wouldn’t care much whether Meta makes some money, too.
For in-between cases, where third parties make some money, Meta will have to choose between staying in the market because others don’t sell enough and Meta leaving the market so that others get more room to sell and thus become profitable.
