Facebook has just rebranded but unlike many are thinking, it is not the social network rebranding, but the company behind it.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new development during Connect 2021, Facebook’s annual developer conference, that his company’s new name will be Meta. It’s a fitting name given Zuckerberg spent the majority of the Connect keynote outlining the “Metaverse”, or what he thinks is the future of the internet.
“We are a company that builds technology to connect”, Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build”, he added.
Zuckerberg basically said he thinks the name “Facebook” doesn’t quite cover everything his company does right now, and that the Facebook brand is so “tightly linked to one product”. Over time, Zuckerberg said he hopes Facebook will be seen as a “metaverse company”.
In a blog post, Zuckerberg elaborated on Meta. While the company’s corporate structure is staying the same, how it reports financial results will change. “Starting with our results for the fourth quarter of 2021, we plan to report on two operating segments: Family of Apps and Reality Labs . . . We also intend to start trading under the new stock ticker we have reserved, MVRS, on 1 December”.
Keep in mind Facebook isn’t the first major tech company to adopt a new company name years after it was founded. Google, for instance, turned into Alphabet in 2015. The actual Google search engine became one of several business units under the Alphabet umbrella/holding company.
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