Forgive my ignorance, but how could something as simple as logging out most likely be something "that they literally haven't thought about"?

I, at least, would assume that that would be considered a basic/essential feature.

If you see enough UX flows you would probably less surprised that an essential feature is 1 missing, 2 inaccessible. A professor of architecture used to ask the question at senior presentations: “where is the door?”. People should have heard him ask that question before and yet somehow people forgot to include something as practical and fundamental as door in their elaborate models. It’s not like these people are idiots, they’re just regular people who have other priorities and are trying to get things out the door before the next review cycle.

Ugh I had a CAD architecture class in engineering school and the final project was to design a restaurant and we did an amazing job building the best restaurant in the world until the teacher asked... where's the kitchen?

Whoops. We got so excited about the pool table and the bar and the reception area that we forgot the only thing that makes a restaurant actually a restaurant... a place to cook food.

I hate to say it but that means your design also failed to consider the foot traffic to and from the kitchen which also affects the dining experience :-) designing stuff can be hard...

It would have been a fantastic bring-your-own-food social lounge though!

There's a reason I work in IT and not architecture these days :)

I'm sorry but there is no way that facebook "didn't think about logging out." They thought about it and decided they didn't want to implement it, whatever the reason is may be up for dispute but, they definitely thought about it.

Probably all of the engineers working at Oculus thought about it.

That doesn't mean the company's "collective mind" thought about it, however.

The lengths some people are willing to go to absolve FB of wrongdoing here are pretty incredible. Concretely, I'm sure the problem has been brought up plenty of times by plenty of people. However, the log out button got clogged up in the phlogiston at FB and they're having a hell of a time looking for it!

I suspect they were so caught up in the idiotic idea that you have to be logged in to Facebook to use the thing that they figured logging out would just make the thing useless, so why allow that? It still seems like having multiple users should have been thought about.

> absolve FB of wrongdoing

much as it is trendy, you really have to think past the binary $company good/evil argument.

My argument is as follows:

1) there is no logout button for your oculus account. Its not a flow that already exists. You need to factory-reset your device to log out.

2) the team that was put in charge of linking FB accounts to oculus are not the same team that owns the home screen gui.

3) working between teams is a hard problem

4) adding a logout flow is a boat load of work, because the rift os was never designed to do logging out, because why would you need to log out of an oculus device, barring cockups?

Personally I think its a mistake to force linking accounts. I can see why they want it, it makes future multiplayer and AR integrations better.

I think it's not an attempt at absolution so much as Hanlon's Razor.

If anything I think the fact that organizations have an emergent "collective mind" that is semi-independent from any individual suggests that organizations should be held to an even higher standard of behavior than they have been.

To be fair, I think the emergent "collective mind" is likely far stupider more instinctual than the minds of the individuals. (hence why considering incentive structures is important)

That aside, I agree that yes, organizations should be held to a higher standard than they have been.

I'm sure they've thought about it, and rejected it.

If the product heads haven't given thought to this despite being more than aware of the current anti-trust environment, then they're just incompetent.

more likely the company's "collective mind" intentionally deprioritized/removed this feature

That doesn't really matter. Facebook has more than used up its credit of trust. Anyone that is not suspicious when FB messes up yet again hasn't paid attention to what they're up to.