Facebook Becomes Meta, But It’s Not First Tech Giant To Change Name

With Facebook changing its name to Meta, the unofficial acronym for the five biggest American tech companies — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google — changes from FAANG to MAANG now

Meta announced as the new name of Facebook company | Getty

New Delhi: Facebook has just become Meta, with the company rebranding itself to focus on the metaverse. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said they now want to be known as a metaverse company, and that the existing name could not "possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future".

Facebook, however, is not the first big tech company to change its name.

READ | Facebook Changes Name To Meta: What Does Meta Mean?

Here are a few firms that rebranded themselves, changing or tweaking the names they were known as before.  

1. Google To Alphabet

In 2015, the search giant renamed itself Alphabet, making Google only a subsidiary firm.

The big tech company, which was worth more than $400 billion at the time, became Alphabet, a technology conglomerate.

"Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies," Larry Page, former chief executive of the company, had then said, explaining the decision. 

2. Apple Dropped 'Computer'

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the company in the 1970s, it was called Apple Computer. In 2007, Apple dropped ‘Computer’ from the company name.

During his Macworld keynote address on January 9, 2007, Jobs announced that Apple would now become Apple Inc, dropping ‘Computer’ from its name. This was because Apple was no longer just a computer company by then with the introduction of the iPhone and the iPod.

3. Twitter

What Twitter today is not what the company started as.

As the story goes, Evan Williams, who worked with Google once, opened a startup called Odeo, which was going to be a platform for podcasts. 

His friend and former colleague at Google, Biz Stone, joined him. Jack Dorsey was an employee at their Odeo firm.  

But Odeo apparently became irrelevant after Apple started podcasting on iTunes. 

Evan and Biz, together with Dorsey, then decided to create something called Twitter, and the microblogging site came into being in 2006.

FAANG To MAANG?

With Facebook changing its name to Meta, the unofficial acronym for the five biggest American tech companies — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google — changes from FAANG to MAANG now. 

FAANG was initially FANG, with CNBC show Mad Money host Jim Cramer coining the term in 2013. 

The second ‘A’ was added in 2017 to include Apple. 

Cramer took to Twitter Thursday to say that he liked the new name of Facebook.

His tweet read: “This is not social media, and while Meta is a short mouthful, I like it.”