Any ardent follower of Silicon Valley and/or venture capital firms will have become used to hearing these words to capture the zeitgeist of technology.

However in light of the recent spending spree that Mark Zuckerberg has been on in the last few months, the quote has been playing again and again in my mind.

The amounts that Facebook have been spent on acquisitions may seem mind boggling.

Instagram — $1 Billion

Whatsapp — $19 Billion

Oculus VR — $2 Billion

For a company worth just over $100 Billion, spending a quarter of your worth is a bold move. And as marketers, we have to wonder, where is this all headed?

Going back four years, Facebook was a platform that needed assistance. In the trend of consumers moving to Smartphones, the number of active desktop users started to drop off.

Unfortunately, for Facebook at the time, they had no real mobile experience. Apps like Twitter, Snapchat and Whatsapp we’re becoming where users were spending time.

Where the users spend the most time is where we should be advertising.

In addition to this (crucially in Snapchat and Whatsapp) their users were no longer skewed to a younger demograph.

So it was set, Instagram was acquired and in one move Facebook not only improved their mobile offering but also removed a competitor. This was then repeated in the more lavish acquisition of Whatsapp.

The larger scale of the purchase can be attributed (for me personally) almost solely to two facts that concerned Facebook.

1. 450 million active users of which 70% of them are active every day.

2. A strong install base in India, Europe & Latin America

So the first two purchases where essential to making up ground in the mobile space.

All in the name of protecting all of the people that marketers would want to pay good money to be able to start a conversation.

But what about Oculus VR?

This is a “skate to where the puck is going to be” move. A risk. But a highly educated one.

Oculus’ focal device is the rift. A highly advanced Virtual headset that has been creating considerable excitement in the gaming world. With one eye on the past, where Zuckerberg and the Facebook team missed mobile, they cannot afford to miss the next big evolution. And consequently where consumers will come to spend their time.

Virtual Reality from a gaming perspective has been the focus of many dreams and aspirations as far back as the 1860’s. The search for the perfect form of escapism felt close in the 1980’s, but technology wasn’t able to deliver.

Palmer Luckey and Oculus VR believe that the time is correct to be able to create a light, low cost device that is suitably advanced to trick you mind into thinking the experience is real. If the team at Oculus are able to complete this task, then it’s not just gaming that will be transformed. Almost every form of interactive media and communications will be disrupted.

Video conference calls will be considerably more natural. Students no longer need to physically be in a classroom. Brands will be able to showcase products and experiences as they’ve never been able to before.

Next Gen Internet is coming and Facebook think that VR is going to be integral.