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Your comment assumes that Zuckerberg and the people at Facebook will be incompetent at nurturing an employee like John Carmack and the other talented Oculus VR

• grey-area 13y ago
  No, it just assumes that the interests of a large corporation which is entering the phase where it needs to show revenue growth every quarter and satisfy shareholders are not aligned with those of a small company attempting to build an experimental product in a completely new field. This is an old story and the outcome is almost always the same (large corp buys small corp, promises to change nothing and stay hands off, circumstances change, large corp looks for projects to downsize or cut). Google has many examples of acquisitions, how many are running in a hands off way now? On top of that, Facebook has shown itself to be untrustworthy many times from a dev and user perspective (beacon, FB credits etc), so if Carmack wants to avoid that and produce something without intrusive advertising for example, they may well clash. None of this means it was a bad idea to sell for oculus, just that selling is ceding control completely to the vision of the larger company in the long term.
  • jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Facebook does not need to satisfy any shareholder except one. I mean, hacker news likes to freak out about fiduciary duty and "omg, corporations are obligated to make maximum profit." But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.), and there is near-zero legal possibility of minority investors forcing them to. This is because investors have almost no say unless it is obvious you are trying to screw them -- normally a subset of them -- or unless there is no plausible way a course of action could make money.
    • grey-area 13y ago
      I've always thought the fiduciary duty argument was silly (and I'm not HN :), so I agree with you there, but that doesn't change the broader point - when you sell a company, it is no longer yours, and the interests and politics of a large corp with public shareholders and revenue targets are not those of a smaller acquisition.
      • jamesaguilar 13y ago
        I wasn't trying to challenge the broader point. I was trying to challenge the specific claim that some folks are making that Facebook Must ruin Oculus because balance sheet, which is nonsense. Although on re reading your comment I can see I replied too soon and you are not one of those.
    • pizza234 13y ago
      > But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.) Engaging in charity and supporting foundations is not related to the "generosity" of the a corporation (who runs it); charity and foundations can be PR and tax-saving strategies. Drug cartels engage in charitable donations; that doesn't make them generous. HSBC (just picked a random one) supports charities. It also launders money for the drug cartels and is generally involved in illegal money transactions. I can pick virtually any big corporation involved in corruption/crime scandals and I'm pretty sure they routinely make charitable acts and/or have their foundations and as well. I certainly don't say that any corporation is corrupt, but the link with foundation/charities and morality of a corporation just doesn't exist.
      • brg 13y ago
        Tax write offs do not work like you seem to imply. There is no net financial gain to any charitable donation . Consider a dollar of profit. If kept on the ledger as profit, a corporation pays around fifty cents of that dollar in tax. If donated that dollar of profit is not taxed, but the corporation now had lost a dollar instead of 50 cents.
  • mark_integerdsv 13y ago
    ...a larger advertising company of the most cynical variety.