Well technically Google still exists; it’s a subsidiary of Alphabet, and people who work at Google are employed by “Google LLC” (and not Alphabet). (In fact I think I remember there was some training that explicitly told us to NOT say that we were employees of Alphabet.)
> I have no fucking idea what the Meta name change was about.
Forget about the metaverse, it seems like it was a good change to me, just to not be named Facebook.
I can tell Meta has a much more positive association in my mind than Facebook (the company). Probably because I associate it with Instagram as strongly as I do with Facebook, and "insta" is still considered kinda cool.
People are having fun on Threads, and somehow zuck seems to be considered cool there. I never would have expected it. I see Instagram mentioned there, I see zuck mentioned there, sometimes I see Meta mentioned there, and I don't know if I've ever seen Facebook mentioned there.
The branding seems to have allowed Threads to have mostly its own branding with strong association with Instagram given the slick onboarding and graph copying, and no real association with Facebook.
Meta is a nameless holding company that stands for nothing. Facebook is a dieing platform that GenX & boomers may still use. At least they seem to have the clue that hitching your company name to a dead platform is a bad business strategy.
It's not growing but I would not say it's dying. People are definitely sti using it and they are making profits. Many young people at least have an account, and many are caught up in the web of Messenger.
That's the goal. This way headlines will read "meta/alphabet fined $X million for selling user data to cartels/illuminati" and nobody will know WTF this is about because they'd need to read the article to learn it's the parent company of Facebook/Google.