FB sold users to advertisers. Very Web 2.0.
Well the potential decentralization of Web3 potentially destroys that business model and the Meta strategy seems like it reflects this potential change in the way Amazon saw the world going to digital?
What in world is Mark offering here? He's investing $10B into... what? AWS/Cloud was a reasonable business pitch (which seemed crazy but essentially: outsource your IT ops to AWS and we can help you scale like crazy very quickly).
What's Mark's pitch here? VR is nowhere near prime-time - just read around even on HN. It's got major issues and still lacks a killer app.
It's a vanity project that only a fantastically rich, out of touch person can indulge in. That or FB is toxic.
Apple was able to catch the paradigm shift of us starting to use our phones for everything, and make loads of money by offering services to a captive audience and sharecropping opportunities to app developers.
Facebook tried to become a platform during the last paradigm shift and failed. Selling users to advertisers has been lucrative but clearly isn't as sticky as the platform model (which is why they have to keep buying up their competitors). So they're trying to push another shift to VR and be the platform for that.
Apple leveraged the power of its brand in that transition (and created a flywheel of sorts to strengthen its brand), whereas the current FB brand wouldn't likely extend as well.
So helps show one reason why FB likely saw the need to change naming and start building a new brand (whereas Apple (and Amazon) went the other way).