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Rift rift assists swift shift at crest of adrift Occulus

CEO Brendan Iribe steps down from the top – was he pushed or did he jump?

Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus is splitting in two, with one arm working on its Rift standalone high-end headset and the other focused on its Gear VR cellphone headset.

As part of the shake-up, CEO Brendan Iribe is stepping down to head up what sounds like product development of the Rift part of the business, and there will be a search for a new CEO.

Iribe announced the change in a blog post arguing that he had "really missed the deep, day-to-day involvement in building a brand new product on the leading edge of technology."

In reality, it would appear to be the classic case of a programmer finding himself out of his depth in running an expanding high-profile company with billions of dollars of investment. Iribe has limited experience in management and finances and maintained a low profile for a hot company that everyone was talking about.

It is notable that his cofounder, Palmer Luckey, has also largely disappeared from public view after he was exposed as having funded Twitter trolls to support Donald Trump's presidential bid and posted obnoxious comments about his wealth and beliefs – a situation that led some developers to say they would refuse to work with Oculus.

Meanwhile, former Microsoft and Qualcomm exec Jon Thomason, who joined Oculus in August as head of software from a VP job at Amazon, will lead the VR company's new mobile arm. According to Iribe, he and Thomason will "work with" Facebook's CTO Mike Schroepfer to find a new CEO.

The shake-up appears to be confined to the top job at the moment, with the company confirming that all other execs are expected to stay in their roles. However, the decision to break the company into two parts and look for a new CEO is a sure sign that the larger Facebook corporate machine has started focusing on its $2bn purchase.

Oculus is a strong player in the VR market but has not jumped out in front, and with Microsoft recently announcing it will enter into the high-end headset market, the company's failure to stake out a dominant position puts it at risk.

Oculus has frequently frustrated customers both in its rollout and its pricing: it is persistently more expensive and later than its targets. Not to mention a clumsy dropping of an earlier promise to make its system open source.

A new, more business-focused CEO will no doubt concentrate on delivering what the company says it will when it says it will. ®

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