Facebook Becomes Meta as It Moves to Metaverse
After weeks of speculation, Facebook’s new name is announced as Meta. In its winter carnival, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced its rebranding and talked about the growing focus on the metaverse.
“Facebook will be metaverse first from now onwards,” Zuckerberg told employees at the company’s annual Connect conference. “The brand is tightly linked to one category that it’s difficult to represent everything the company is doing at present; the future holds greater possibility.”
According to the company information, the company is changing its corporate structure and expanding its vision to expand its virtual spaces where people interact via digital avatars and trade under the ticker symbol MVRS.
Facebook and its apps Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, will be housed in a separate division from Facebook Reality Labs, which boosted its virtual reality products.
The rebranding comes after the company is embroiled in a public relations crisis over a series of documents leaked by Frances Haugen, former product manager in the US Congress. The documents revealed the company's internal operations and its decisions that seem to prioritize profits over people’s well-being. Zuckerberg criticized the reports and called them the “false picture” of the company.
Mike Proulx, Forrester's vice president and research director, said the name change would not solve the internal problems of Facebook. “If Meta doesn’t address the prevalent issues, those issues will keep chasing the metaverse.”
Seeding into a New Future
Meta reflects the company’s vision for the company beyond its mainstream activities. Talking about the company’s journey from a Harvard dorm room to a global company, Zuckerberg said, “the company has come far from desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video, but this is not the end of the line.”
“The next platform and medium is expected to be more immersive and will embody the internet as we know it as the metaverse.” Revealing the origin of the name Meta, Zuckerberg wrote that it comes from the Greek word which means beyond, in a blog. He further explained that it symbolizes more to build as the next chapter to the story.
More Than a Name
Colin Sebastian, the Research Analyst in Baird Equity, said, “The corporate name change signifies signals for a transformation for Facebook. The name ‘Meta’ reveals the company’s future endeavors into developing the next computing platform, as the successor to the mobile Internet.” He further added that it might take five to 10 years for the set vision to become mainstream.
Sebastian further added that “Zuckerberg has given an ambitious vision for the Metaverse with photo-realistic avatars and spaces, EMG input, holograms and voice interactions that generate immersive virtual versions of work, play, socializing, shopping, traveling, etc.
That is why many companies are competing to gain an added advantage in the metaverse these days.
The name change has empowered Facebook to wrestle with giants in the open market, focusing on data collection and technology implementation for a thriving future opportunity for an imbibing future.
However, the Director of the University of Notre Dame’s Tech Ethics Center, Kirsten Martin, is unsure about Facebook’s ability to handle the vast metaverse entity. Expressing the concern, Martin said,” the company’s ability to manage content was in controversy, which further questions its ability to handle the content in the virtual space in its new version.
Facebook is not the first company to undergo a name transformation. Earlier, Google had rebranded itself under Alphabet to house its disparate businesses. The changes also helped companies to stay away from bad publicity.