Much in the same way as Google did with “Alphabet”, Facebook is planning it’s journey towards becoming metaverse with different name where Facebook would be just one product along with many products such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more under a parent company. The idea signals the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail.
The metaverse is going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet, Zuckerberg had said. Metaverse is the term that was coined by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a real world.
The rebranding also would serve the purpose of alienating the negative publicity the Facebook is garnering foe the methods it employs to run itself. , Frances Haugen, a whistleblower recently leaked internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before US Congres. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere also are increasingly concerned about the impact of Facebook and are seen trying to control the company more.
Google In 2015, had reorganized itself under a holding company called Alphabet which enabled it to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech.
Zuckerberg envisages that over the next several years his company to be seen as a metaverse company from primarily being seen as a social media company. It already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg thinks will eventually be as common as smartphones
Though it is very closely guarded secret, it is widely presumed that the new name will have something to do with Horizon. It is also the name of the VR version of that the company is developing for the past few years.