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Comment by t_mann | Hacker News Reader

The word Alphabet didn't go away when Google renamed their parent company, and I'm confident that the word meta will also prove stronger than its SV appropriation.

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In think in the case of Alphabet, they wanted to insulate the Google brand and company from their other ventures, and they’ve successfully done that. Facebook was doing somewhat the opposite. They wanted to insulate their other brands from the Facebook brand. There’s also some suggestion that Mark Zuckerberg sees VR as the whole future of the company, and wanted that reflected in the name.

'Meta' is being used for their branding 'Meta Quest 2' Alphabet isn't really used in that fashion

either way they should go with 'Metaspace' or 'Fluppy pups International' since everyone loves puppies

Extremely stupid decision to rename it. Out of all their products only Oculus has overwhelmingly positive brand name, I don't know why they will want to change that. Would make more sense to build stuff around the Oculus name.

Whatsapp is overwhelmingly popular, no? I'd guess much more so than Oculus.

And anecdotally, IG users seem to feel very positively about it in a way that isn't true for fb or Twitter users. Most of the handwringing about IG that I've seen comes from commentators

IG is popular among its users and doesn't have the same image as FB has but it also has been in news for reports on body dysmorphia, depression etc

You are right about WhatsApp though, it aslo largely has a very positive image till now

Yea, but the IG complaints are more of a moral panic than anything else, and don't come from any of the actual users. Though you're right that that feeds into the overall brand.

I think a more apt example is Oracle, which is used in a lot of their branding.

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