Is the Quest Pro Meta’s Nexus, or its Pixel?
Meta is moving its AR/VR/mixed reality (‘XR’) efforts into ecosystem mode.
What does this all mean for Quest devices?
Microsoft PR for VR
Meta used its announcement of the Quest Pro and partnership with Microsoft to reference Android and Windows as ‘open’ ecosystems it intends to follow, in contrast to Apple’s ‘closed’ ecosystem approach.
[See Mark Zuckerberg’s interviews with The Verge and Stratechery, for example.]
Until now, Oculus/Quest was more or less the Apple-style ‘closed’ model, so how will this change Meta’s approach to its XR devices?
Will they directly compete with the hardware partners they want to attract (Zuckerberg specifically mentioned Samsung as a desirable partner “in the future”)?
Or:
will they become platform examples, merely seeding the market for other OEMs?
Android, interestingly, has done both but in the opposite order.
From 2008-2015 at Google we used Nexus projects to catalyse the adoption of Android.
They delivered value by:
instrumenting the selected partners (device OEM, chipset vendor, distributing mobile networks) with deeper Android knowhow, building their Android capability and growing their investment in it
giving us a mechanism to incentivise and reward partners with our attention on the next release and generate interest and leverage for us about who would be selected
giving those launch partners a halo in the industry to be seen to have worked with the Android team
promoting each new release of Android
ensuring each release was completed as a fully workable platform, not just shelfware or a component to be completed by partners
In 2016 Google changed direction by making products without partners, under the Pixel brand it originated with Chromebooks.
Google’s co-branded Nexus devices were made with partners were shelved in 2016, in favour of Google’s exclusively branded Pixel devices
Pictured: the LG Nexus 4 (2012) and the Google Pixel 7 (2022) .
Pixel doesn’t deliver what Nexus did, except for promoting Android (though Pixel launches are not directly tied to Android releases).
Its purpose is different: not a halo, but a flagship implementation of the best of what Google can do on Android that at the least sets a benchmark for the Android ecosystem to beat and at best gets a ‘pure Google’ experience into the hands of many users.
This is what Quest does for Meta today and with a similarly low volume like Pixel, albeit in a much smaller overall market for XR headsets rather than smartphones.
As with Google, Meta will see the inherent tension here:
it wants its software products to be in front of all users whatever devices or platforms they use, so it maintains a multi-platform strategy
Quest (and Pixel) need to differentiate from other devices on the same platform
Like Google, Meta’s best opportunity to differentiate hardware is in software.
Succeeding as a consumer electronics business needs different capabilities and operates different business models from succeeding as a consumer internet business, and neither Meta nor Google has history succeeding in consumer electronics, while both have almost unparalleled histories succeeding in the consumer internet.
Apple of course is the inverse: it wants to be the one device (or set of devices) that a user does everything with, so it is single-platform with its apps and services and shuns distribution or interoperability with third parties except where absolutely necessary.
The details of Meta’s open ecosystem plans are not clear, but its messaging indicates a software platform for multiple hardware vendors to use.
A closed approach probably has more impactful disadvantages when trying to create a new product category, since you carry the cost, risk and complexity of moving the world to your vision alone–note that Apple typically follows others into categories when it has worked out how to win, rather than creating new ones; iPad is an exception to this rule.
Open ecosystems, on the other hand, trade this end-to-end control by a single player for scale across all players, to multiply R&D, marketing and distribution budgets but at the risk of fragmentation.
For Meta, perhaps the expense, uncertainty and timetable for success in XR were too much for just its balance sheet to sustain.
Being on the receiving end of Apple’s sabre in respect of ads and ‘privacy’ probably helped focus their mind too.
For Meta then, moving Quest from a ‘Pixel’ model to a ‘Nexus’ model would support its open ecosystem objectives–and take further pressure off its balance sheet to succeed as a consumer electronics company.
But can it build a category big enough to sustain the efforts of other hardware products that delivers enough value to those OEMs?
