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Comment by canniballectern | Hacker News Reader

I bet this will be generally effective at shielding their other properties from bad news about Facebook.

For ordinary people, "WhatsApp is owned by Meta" is going to feel really different from "WhatsApp is owned by Facebook".

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Will this work, or will this just be like Google's Alphabet, which the general person-on-the-street doesn't know or care about?

Having people on the street not know or care about who owns WhatsApp and Instagram seems like it might be the point.

My point was that Google's rebrand DIDN'T work. Very few people know Google as Alphabet. They still know it as Google (the people on the street that is). So, will Facebook's rebrand have the effect of Bell Atlantic + GTE's rebrand as Verizon, or will it have the effect Google's rebrand as Alphabet?

I hope (and feel) like the ruse will not work.

That's because all of Google's main consumer properties didn't get branding changes and are still all "Google Maps" or "Google Photos", etc...

WhatsApp and Instagram are much stronger brands, and are not already branded "Facebook WhatsApp" or "WhatsApp by Facebook".

Really not true. The same number of people will know Facebook as owning them as do now. Like now people are like, "you know Instagram is owned by Facebook right?"

That's not going to change.

> "WhatsApp by Facebook".

Well, the splash screen says "Whatsapp from Facebook", and the description on the Google Play store starts with "WhatsApp from Facebook is a FREE messaging and video calling app."

So, it's out there, even if people haven't changed the way they think.

Disclosure: I worked for WhatsApp until 2019

They are called Google maps/Google photos because these are Google products.

Google is responsible for alphabets web services. Check out Wikipedia for actual examples like waymo (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.)

Including folks who work in the field - I've never heard "I just got a job at Alphabet".

Google didn't change its org structure for consumer-facing rebranding purposes. It was a move for the market/investors, to separate out more clearly the (lack of) profitability of individual sectors and acquisitions of the company that don't happen to be ads or search. Alphabet was about creating internal transparency.

That's the story. At the same time their former CEO made quite a few statements that did not sit well with the management of the daughter companies, Google's reputation is such that some distance really doesn't hurt in the PR department.

I think you have it flipped around.

We still think of Alphabet as Google. So while Facebook may effectively become Meta, people will still say "Facebook does X" when they should technically mean "Meta does X".

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the rebrand? If Facebook is going all in on Meta, wouldn't they want people to think Meta does X instead of Facebook does X? Especially if they're trying to distance themselves from the increasing stink that is Facebook.

What Facebook wants and what the public winds up doing isn't necessarily the same thing.

People on the street don't know about Alphabet is what the above post implied. People will not know about Meta as well hence everyone will still say it is own by Facebook which gotten so much negative feedback that it had to change its name to Meta but essentially still the FB who is own by that Zuck guy.

The reason the person-on-the-street doesn't care about Alphabet is that people don't interact with any Alphabet company except Google. Waymo? Calico? Loon? Wing? Hardly any ordinary people think about those. (Maybe some day, but not today.)

By contrast, lots of ordinary people interact with WhatsApp and Instagram. It will be/feel different when they're "owned by Meta" vs. "owned by Facebook."

So if the Whatsapp and Instagram brands are stronger than Facebook / Meta, what will the point be here, to distance and separate the sullied Facebook brand from the not-yet-sullied Whatsapp and Instagram brands by using an intermediary vanilla Meta brand?

Depends on what we mean by "work". My impression is that Google didn't change its name due to shame or for consumer branding, but rather to better reflect the company's structure where not everything is Google anymore. In the case of FB, the change could be in part due to bad reputation and in part consumer oriented.

My understanding was Google's rebranding was mainly targeted at investors so that when financials were reported, it would be split out between Google vs. other divisions. It would make sense that most everyday people wouldn't know about this.

FB's rebrand seems targeted to everyday consumers, so I would bet their brand strategy would change to cater to that, in a way that Google/Alphabet never cared to.

My mother doesn't associate facebook to whatsapp, although I have explained several times.

The day facebook went down for some hours, she woke me up complaining "the internet was down"

Meta is a real word that's still actively being used. imo this will make it harder to find bad news about the company in the future.

That might not be entirely coincidental.

Entirely. Almost seems like word play to soften the blow of critical headlines.

Like “apple”?

Yeah, but there's already a ton of training data available even when Google was just starting out. That's not the case with Meta.

You still have a point.

Maybe but I'd be surprised. How many (both tech folks or news articles) really associate Fitbit/Waymo/DeepMind primarily with Alphabet instead of Google? Even clicking a recent story which refers to it as an Alphabet subsidy they reference it as "DeepMind, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet,".

Worked for Xfinity

This might be the nicest thing I’ve ever said about Comcast but I think their slow roll-out approach was better (from a PR perspective) than what facebook is doing. There was no big bandaid pull where Comcast was suddenly Xfinity it just sort of... happened?

Older companies tend to be run by pre-internet leadership, with deep and wide political connections and awareness.

They tend to do better with PR slight of hand. Maybe because they get it’s all a political boondoggle and SV companies are run by finance wonks.

Did it really happen though? I still see stuff with Comcast on it. Like technician trucks, random web pages, postal mailings, etc. It seems to me that they just came up with the term Xfinity and then slowly associated it back with the Comcast name, so now both Comcast and Xfinity can be thought of as terrible companies.

Sadly, I think you’re right, given a long enough time frame.

It’s probably a smart move on Facebook’s part. Doesn’t stop them being terrible though.

> Doesn’t stop them being terrible though.

Well, it depends on if they want to keep the Meta name clean from scandals. But I doubt they manage too. It’s a company DNA issue at this point.

With name like "meta" it will be harder to find bad press about them.

Should have called themselves "F" but I think you're actually onto something.

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