The Rocinante Essays

Why Enterprise VR Failed - Episode 2: Strapped In and Let Down

• Daniel Eckert • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Once upon a time—okay, five years ago—enterprise VR looked like the next corporate messiah. Training, collaboration, simulations… the future was here, and it had headsets. Unfortunately, so did the IT audit team. What started with tethered headset monstrosities that required a gaming PC the size of a dishwasher evolved into standalone devices like the Oculus Quest—cheaper, wireless, and just good enough to get everyone irrationally excited. Enter Oculus for Business, where Facebook slapped a new sticker on a consumer headset, charged double, and called it “enterprise-grade.” Spoiler: it wasn’t.

While enterprises stuffed Quests into training rooms like Halloween candy, IT departments screamed into the void. No security. No management. No way past the firewall. Then in true tech-industry fashion, Meta quietly lit the whole thing on fire, retired the platform, and offered a replacement that wouldn’t ship for two years. HTC fumbled, Pico got bought by TikTok’s parents, and HP and Lenovo noped out entirely. And so, enterprise VR found itself in a coma—propped up by buzzwords, abandoned hardware, and Zuck’s metaverse pipe dream, complete with legless avatars floating in empty virtual boardrooms. RIP, Enterprise VR. We hardly patched ye.

Why Enterprise VR Failed: A 7 part Series - Episode 2 - Strapped In and Let Down. 

This audio cast is Part 2 of 7 and extrapolates on the reasons enterprise VR failed by Daniel Eckert, Copyright 2025 Rocinante Research.

Maybe a better title for this episode should be "How Enterprise VR Got Duped by Consumer Tech."

Once upon a time.

Enterprise VR was on the verge of something big. Consultants and gamers alike were gushing over the potential of virtual reality in the workplace, promising a revolution in training, collaboration, and simulation.

Episode 1 “Overpromising and underdelivering” focused on the most common claims to determine if the Enterprise bought a first-class ticket on the hype train – or if they got their money’s worth. That episode concluded that a majority of the claims were true, or close enough to being true. 

There was value in Enterprise VR - if you didn't go overboard. 

I'm not sure I'm buying it. If Enterprise VR unlocked so much value, why isn’t everyone rockin’ a VR headset right now?

“Hey – who says it failed? a few readers quipped. "We are going strong.” And I too embrace that enthusiasm.

Don't get me wrong, I too am a big fan of Enterprise VR, but our position is that it didn't live up to the hype and face-planted into a pile of unmet expectations. Despite soaking up years of breathless headlines and TED Talk-level optimism, Enterprise VR had a promising start but quickly fell out of favor due to a perfect storm of issues and false hopes.

So, what happened? Why didn’t VR revolutionize the workplace like we were promised? And more importantly—who (or what) do we get to blame?

Episode 2 of our series takes us on a stroll through a recent history of the hardware manufacturers. It's good to remember the culprits, catastrophes, and corporate chaos that turned “the future of work” into a graveyard of Metaverse experts, VR developers, and immersive learning enthusiasts.

Episode 2's story is organized into 4 scenes:

Scene 1: The Tethered World

Scene 2: The Oculus Era

Scene 3: How the Competition Failed to Fill the Void

And finally, Scene 4: The Meta Era (Or as I like to say, The Meta Error)

Scene 1, The Tethered World

Flashback to the early VR days when headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC VIVE Pro, Valve Index, Pimax, HP Reverb, and the Ferrari of headsets—the Varho—were all tethered to beefy gaming PCs that made more noise than an F4 launching off an aircraft carrier. 

You needed seven cables connected to a potpourri of boxes, power supplies and a massive computer to make the magic happen. You also needed one hundred and forty-four square feet of empty play space so you wouldn't crash into your desk or trip over those bean bag chairs while you were wearing your VR headset. 

For those not technically inclined, it was like assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded.

What about operating the VR rigs? 

It was like a stress test for your sanity —unless you had access to Best Buy's Geek Squad secret black ops division. Trying to survive a VR immersion session without dropping frames, crashing mid-demo, or getting trapped in the endless purgatory of driver updates? Yeah… good luck with that.

I heard the price of a mid-range setup could be as high as $5,000 per system. 

That's true. And if you wanted an elite rig - you could be spending up to $15,000. Now multiply that by a handful of VR stations and all of a sudden, your “cutting-edge training initiative” had the budget of a small country’s GDP.

When it worked, it was amazing. 

But the moment you tried to scale it across the enterprise —it quickly became obvious that tethered solutions were just too expensive and difficult to manage.

Clearly, something had to change.

Scene 2, Part 1 - The Oculus Era

Enter 2018: Oculus, now owned by Facebook, launched the Oculus Go, a standalone VR headset—with built-in processing power and no wires for just $199. Around that same time, Pico, a major player in Asia and Europe, released the Pico G2. 

Both were 3 doff headsets, 3 degrees of freedom—meaning users could look around but couldn’t physically move through space like in a fully tethered 6 degrees of freedom VR experience. 

These headsets were standalone, wireless, and no longer required tethering to a gaming PC.

Sure, they weren’t as powerful as their tethered 6 doff cousins, but they were cheap and easy to deploy. And if there’s one thing enterprises love, it’s cheap.

Suddenly, businesses could afford to implement VR. Walmart jumped in and purchased 17,000 Oculus Go headsets for customer service training, training over a million employees in VR. Companies like Uptale built no-code platforms so businesses could create VR experiences without hiring an army of gaming developers, script writers, and graphic artists.

Then, in May 2019, the Oculus Quest arrived and blew the doors off the industry. It was a wireless 6 doff headset with 2 motion controllers.

The Oculus Quest was not quite as good as a tethered headset, but it was way better than the Oculus Go and Pico G2. The quest was just good enough not to suck. 

No external sensors to setup. Just clear a space, put it on and go. Oh, and at $399, it was one-tenth the cost of a traditional tethered VR setup.

In October 2020, the Quest 2 dropped—lighter, faster, with better visuals, longer battery life, and improved performance. 

By the beginning of 2023, over 20 million Quest VR headsets had been sold globally. It is not confirmed how many were purchased for the enterprise, but even at 2% (a realistic number I just pulled out of my… pocket), that’s still 400,000 headsets.

It was all coming together.

Scene 2, Part 2 of the Oculus Era, Facebook’s half-baked fix called Oculus for Business.

Suddenly, enterprises weren’t just interested in VR—they were drooling over it, buying thousands of these standalone headsets.

By this point, enterprises were stuffing Oculus Quests into their training programs like sugar crazed kids grabbing candy on Halloween. More than 400,000 Quest 1’s were sold by the end of 2019 (or an estimated (but not confirmed) 8,000 units were purchased by the enterprise). These were consumer devices trying to get on the corporate network – and IT was losing its mind.

There was just one tiny problem: these were consumer devices. The forked Android OS running the Quest was a security nightmare for the enterprise. No enterprise security, no remote management, no proper data protection. Just a fancy Android device that IT departments hated with the fiery passion only geeks could get excited about.

Did that stop companies from using them? Nope.

Did IT approve? Also nope.

So, to address the challenge of using wireless VR headsets in the Enterprise,

Facebook launched Oculus for Business or OFB in April of 2019. 

OFB, a portal solution to manage Oculus enterprise VR headsets was built on top of the Facebook Workplace platform. 

Workplace was nothing more than the Facebook platform, but for the enterprise. 

To be clear, OFB was separate from the consumer Facebook application stack. It was nothing more than a simple sass solution you received for "free" when you purchased the Enterprise version of the Quest 1.

At $999 per headset, you received:

A Quest 1 with 128GB of memory and a 1-year warranty.

A “dedicated” enterprise support line (which was just the consumer support system repurposed because the OfB group hadn’t thought about providing enterprise support until 2-weeks prior to launching OfB).

An account for Workplace to manage the headset.

A commercial-use license—so if you built your own VR app, you didn’t have to pay Facebook a licensing fee for the privilege of running it on a Quest headset. 

To make sure the Enterprise had the most annoying purchasing experience, headsets could only be purchased from the OFB group.

But, they only approved the order, they didn't actually ship you the headsets.

OFB had only two distribution partners. Unfortunately, these were not common business partners for most enterprises, meaning most companies didn't have a business relationship with them, which normally meant you had to prepay before it would ship. 

Which reminds me of a conversation I had with procurement the first time we placed an order for 200 Enterprise Quest headsets.

Let me get this straight, you want us to wire some unknown distributor a few hundred thousand dollars before we receive the hardware? Why can't I just order from Ingram? 

Because Ingram doesn't carry Enterprise Headsets.

I show right on my screen there are Quest VR headsets for $370 at Ingram. The Quest VR headsets on your purchase order are $999. 

Those are consumer headsets at Ingram and we need the Enterprise version of the headsets.

They look the same to me.

They are the same, but different. 

Different how?

The hardware is the same, but the software is different. 

Why not buy the consumer hardware and then put the enterprise software on it? 

Oculus won't let me.

That's just stupid.

I know, welcome to my world. 

From a hardware perspective, these headsets were nothing more than a consumer Quest that you could buy on Amazon. Or put another way, a consumer quest with management software. 

To be fair, it was a Quest 1 with a forked version of the Android OS build used in the consumer device, but the fork was significantly slimmed down. 

And let's not forget it did have a different sticker on the box.

The issue wasn’t the hardware—it was the OS. Facebook had access to an enterprise version of Android that could secure the headset for the enterprise… and ignored it. Instead, Facebook just forked the consumer build to make it easier for their engineers. 

A consumer build, repackaged for enterprise. It was like pinning a bigger security badge on a mall cop, calling them a secret service agent, and assigning them to protect the President. What could possibly go wrong? 

When you needed support for your Enterprise Quests – You’d call the “dedicated” enterprise number, only to get routed to consumer support, who’d tell you to file a ticket through your Workplace account. Need a repair? No cross-shipping—your headset had to be received, fixed, and sent back. Average turnaround? About 40 days.

A best practice for enterprises was to buy 10-20% more headsets than needed so you always had a spare just in case something went wrong. This really wasn’t an issue if all of your headsets were in a single location – but… if you deployed headsets to different offices around the country, it was necessary to always have 1-2 spares in every location.

And believe it or not, it kinda worked. OfB allowed companies to provision and manage headsets centrally. But when you employ experienced consumer product managers and ask them to build enterprise solutions that have never built enterprise solutions – you get some… ummm… issues.

Let’s talk enterprise security—or rather, the complete absence of it.

At launch, the Quest headset and Oculus for Business came with zero support for enterprise Mobile Device Management. No AirWatch, no Intune, no Mobile Iron, not even a whiff of L-DAP or SAM-L. I T teams were promised integration, but they would have to wait. And wait. 

What they got was licensing fees so over inflated, it even made Oracle blush.

All of this ran inside Facebook’s cloud

—no on-prem, no AWS, no GCP. Just Zuckerberg’s walled garden of Big Brotherware.

No proxy support, no enterprise VPNs, no firewall compatibility. User authentication? Nope—just headset-level access. You lose a device, and boom—so long, sensitive data.

No patch testing, no role-based access, no multi-user anything. It was the enterprise equivalent of security theater without the costumes or the script.

Because nothing says “secure corporate deployment” like putting sensitive data in a place where a social media company had the legal right to view it whenever they felt like it.

It was obvious; the product management team that was driving design decisions for OFB had no enterprise experience as a majority of the issues highlighted over the last 5 minutes are non-starters for any enterprise.

Despite these issues, enterprises still tried to make it work. There were several organizations that wanted to roll out thousands of Quests—if only they could get them past IT security audits.

Let me summarize what I heard.

L&D found a shiny new way to make training better, faster, and less soul-sucking. Oculus sold you a $500 headset for $1,000—but hey, it came with a fancy dashboard.

You bought in, spent big on custom VR courses, hired staff, ramped up deployment… and then I T showed up with a security audit and a flamethrower.

Turns out, these headsets couldn’t pass basic enterprise security. No firewall access, no integration with the corporate Learning Management System, and no access to the internal network.

Enterprise VR leaders spent two years creating offline hacks and begging I T to look the other way and then... in October 2021 Facebook killed, you mean retired, OK, I mean Facebook retired Oculus for Business during their Facebook Connect 2021 conference. 

Enterprises were stuck with whatever they had purchased. They were not even allowed to donate their headsets or give them away! They basically got a finger in the eye and no tax write off.

As a consolidation prize you could upgrade to its replacement - Quest for Business, or QFB, that would be available in a few months.

Let me fact check that for you. QFB was released November 2023 – almost two years after the announcement that OFB would be shut down.

Why did Facebook kill OFB? 

No one really knows why, but Facebook’s PR spin was peak corporate gobbledygook. 

Meanwhile, some enterprises had sunk over $10 million into VR, with thousands of Quests deployed—and no real management tools to speak of. 

The result? Facebook left those companies high and dry, holding a bag of insecure headsets.

Sadly, The tech industry has a long, proud history of ghosting its enterprise customers.

Google Glass Enterprise. Relaunched, overpriced, and quietly axed in 2023—leaving companies with thousand-dollar face ornaments.

Microsoft’s Cortana for business? Marketed as your AI productivity BFF, then killed off without even a shrug.

Amazon Dash Buttons for Business? Encouraged bulk buys, then pulled the plug overnight. No updates, or refunds.

And Cisco Flip Video? Bought for half a billion, sold to schools, and then torched. Whole programs, gone. Poof.

The Moral of the story? When the tech industry says, “Trust us,” get ready to be ghosted—harder than your last Tinder date after a two-hour dinner at the French Laundry.

Scene #3. How the Competition Failed to Fill the Void

With Facebook abandoning ship, you’d think HTC or Pico would step in and save the enterprise market. HP and Lenovo also were baking new products in the oven – maybe not as innovative as Oculus – but the solutions were starting to come from companies with enterprise experience.

HTC’s VIVE Focus 3, released in June of 2021, was supposed to be the ultimate enterprise headset. It had better specs than the Quest 2—but somehow, it ran slower.

Here's the lead developer of a Fortune 500 Enterprise VR Initiative:

A Fortune 500 company hired us to build six VR job-skill simulations to be deployed on the Quest 2. Two weeks before launch, the client pivoted from Quests 2's to the HTC VIVE Focus 3 because of security concerns, forcing a four-week code conversion and two months of performance tuning. Despite the Focus 3 being theoretically 20% faster, it was 30% slower due to poor OS optimization. To add insult to injury, the VIVE management software bricked 10% of headsets during provisioning. We finally worked out all the kinks, but users hated the awkward head strap design. The HTCs couldn't pass a security audit either, so it was necessary to side load the courseware and then turn Wi-Fi off - negating the need for enterprise management software all together. While the training received great reviews, the initiative was ultimately scrapped as executives had moved on to the next shiny object. 

In Asia and Europe, Pico became the VR headset of choice—not because it offered a stellar user experience (Here's a spoiler for ya - it didn’t), 

Companies purchase them because it wasn’t a product from Facebook. 

Remember, the Quest wasn’t exactly a globetrotter—Facebook only bothered launching it in a handful of countries. And let’s be honest, trusting Facebook with enterprise privacy is like hiring a raccoon to guard your lunch. 

So, by process of elimination, Pico it was. Sure, the UX was mediocre at best, but at least you could duct-tape on some mobile device management tools like ArborXR, ManageXR, or 42Gears. Outside the U.S., Picos were everywhere. Inside the U.S.? About as common as a fax machine repairman.

Meanwhile, Lenovo had been quietly building a game-changing VR management platform from the ground up. It was true enterprise-class management software, running on an enterprise Android OS, installed on a white labeled Pico Neo 3. Lenovo software, Lenovo firmware, Pico hardware—it was all coming together. Everything was ready, and Lenovo was putting the final touches on the launch. 

Then—because this story needed more drama—ByteDance, yes that ByteDance, the TikTok overlords, swooped in and bought Pico in August 2021, just 90 days before Lenovo was going to launch it's enterprise VR product line. 

Lenovo and ByteDance go together like cats and vacuum cleaners. So Lenovo took one look at the new ownership, punched their own face and cried softly, and noped right out of the enterprise VR game.

HP was working on something very similar to Lenovo, and unfortunately, the ByteDance acquisition derailed their efforts too. 

Lenovo and HP—two companies poised to push enterprise VR forward—ended up canceling their programs and exiting the enterprise VR space shortly after ByteDance took over Pico.

Enterprise VR teams were officially screwed. OFB was shut down. Lenovo and HP shut down. 

The only real game left was HTC, Pico, and the tethered players. And none of them had demonstrated an ability to scale the enterprise.

And things were about to get worse.

Finally, Scene #4, the Meta Era (you mean error). 

On October 21, 2021, at Connect 2021, the tech world braced for a massive Facebook announcement. Was it the grand reveal of the “Presence Platform”, or improved hand tracking? Was it Horizon Home or the new Voice SDK? 

Maybe it the under-the-breath blog post announcing the cancellation of Oculus for Business? 

No, the real big-brain play was Facebook (and Oculus) hitting the corporate rebrand button and emerging as Meta. “Meta” was short for “The Metaverse”, as Zuck laid out “his vision of the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet — The metaverse is a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can't do in the physical world.”

Meta’s metaverse was the future of social engagement and work in the virtual world

—because when you’ve got a reputation for data mining, misinformation, and making all your money on advertising, the best way to change the narrative are distractions. 

Zuck had hijacked the term “metaverse” and set his PR hype cycle machine to nuclear.

For businesses that gave a damn about VR - the cancelling of Oculus for Business wasn’t just a slap in the face - it was a full-on, steel-toed kick to the digital groin. It was like watching someone set fire to your house and then offer you a VR headset to “reimagine it” in the metaverse.

How could anyone rationalize Meta stating that the metaverse was the future of work when no enterprise could get their VR headsets behind the firewall?

And just like that, businesses banking on VR were left with the metaphorical stability of a Jenga tower in an earthquake. Meanwhile, Zuck and friends were too busy trying to sell us on legless avatars in virtual boardrooms, as if anyone, anywhere, had ever said,

You know what would make meetings less awful? Cartoon characterized avatars floating in space!

Fast forward 1 more year. 

When the Meta Quest Pro was released in October twenty twenty-two, Zuckerburg announced a partnership with Microsoft and Accenture to connect Microsoft's MDM software, Intune for Quest VR headsets, enabling access to Microsoft Teams, providing Office integration, and user management to support enterprise device management.

So, at Connect 2022, Zuck, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Accenture’s Julie Sweet, held hands and sang kumbaya letting everyone know that they had an enterprise solution. Adding InTune to Quest headsets was a big deal!

And for the next year… all you could hear was crickets. Nothing happened. In fact, nothing happened for another 18 months.

So, after learning about the mess caused by the headset manufacturers, what have we learned? 

Enterprise VR wasn’t actually dead; it was just mostly comatose. 

The demand for immersive training, collaboration, and simulation is real, but without actual enterprise-grade hardware-you know, with security, IT management, and basic respect for firewalls, businesses are stuck in VR purgatory. 

It feels to me that Meta keeps pushing its metaverse fantasy, but no one’s buying if the headsets aren’t secure. Meanwhile, HTC and Pico keep tripping over themselves, leaving no real wireless headset savior in sight.

In summary, by the beginning of 2022, the enterprise VR landscape... was headless.

Oculus for Business? Officially dead. Meta promised a new “Quest for Business” coming soon—which in tech speak means “eventually… maybe.”

HTC had a shot at dominance—and promptly tripped over their own cables.

Lenovo and HP? Tapped out and walked away.

Pico got scooped up by ByteDance.

Meanwhile, Facebook rebranded as Meta and started pitching the Metaverse like it was the lovechild of the Segway, 3D TVs, Fyre Festival, and Google Glass—a hype train with no brakes and no destination.

What started as a revolution in training and collaboration quickly became an exercise in frustration. Companies poured millions into VR, only to get half-baked enterprise solutions riddled with security flaws, useless management tools, and zero IT compliance.

Meta’s abrupt shutdown of Oculus for Business may have been the final nail in the coffin, stranding enterprises with headsets that didn’t meet corporate standards or identified as a solution with no roadmaps.

Today, companies must choose between duct-taping consumer headsets into workflows or finding creative ways to deploy VR without IT's blessing. 

Until enterprise VR gets real support, it’s like betting on a horse that’s already been turned into glue.

So yeah, Rest In Peace Enterprise wireless headsets. Meta, HTC, and Pico, didn’t just drop the ball; they deflated it, set it on fire, and then tried to sell us an NFT of the ashes.

But there’s more — it wasn’t just the hardware manufacturers who let us down. Maybe there was another villain hiding in the background. Up next in Episode 3: Enterprise VR Development Tools? What Development Tools?

About the Author

Daniel Eckert finally escaped 29 years of corporate consulting in late 2023—including 8 grueling years in the chaotic trenches of Enterprise VR, where his unofficial title was Chief Reality Officer. His job? Helping clients find “value” while dancing around the fire, watching The Wizard of Oz synced to Dark Side of the Moon, and pretending it all made sense.

Over the years, Daniel became fluent in over 17 dialects of corporate buzzword, once placing 2nd in the prestigious 2021 International Innovation Freak-Off. 

Daniel also co-authored the landmark paper The Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Soft Skills Training in the Enterprise, a study cited 73% more often than the "Conspiracy Can Wait Readit thread" that offers suspiciously passionate people a way to vent about training simulations and lizard people.

Daniel now spends his semi-retirement as a Principal at Rocinante Research — where he translates hype into reality and occasionally into memes. You can find more of his unapologetically honest takes on Medium and LinkedIn.