Facebook acquisition is terrible for their ecosystem. It's driving away some of their most enthusiastic early adopters, and for what? Some vague expertise from facebook? Where is facebooks amazing ecosystem, especially in gaming? They've squeezed their facebook developers so much, and changed the goalposts on what they are allowed to do so much that major devs are struggling. It's hardly dynamic, or without its problems, so I'm not sure what CliffyB is on about here.
Oh, advertising. That thing that doesn't work all that well with VR.
You see, I'd draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. Facebook is struggling to stay relevant, and so is purchasing other people's users to keep the merry-go-round going, which isn't cost effective in the long run. They are unable to change the serious deficiencies in their own company that is driving away the demographic they value most. They are unable to penetrate overseas markets like whatsapp, so they had to buy them out. Their software development in-house were unable to conceptualise and produce a free lightweight messaging app that worked as well as whatsapp.
When cliffy is saying Whatsapp have done great since their acquisition, when it is only 6 weeks ago it happened, you know the guy is struggling with reality. Anecdotally, my entire circle of friends of about 20 people are switching over, in ones and twos, to telegram, which saw 8m more downloads after news of the acquisition broke. How much erosion of the whatsapp userbase has there been? Cliffy doesn't know - so why is he pretending everything is fine?
I doubt notch is the only developer that switched from enthusiastic to not interested. I'm sure a bunch of them felt less strongly, but still switched from fully committed to wait and see.