As a part of their plan to create a metaverse, Facebook Inc changed its name to Meta. Although the popular social media will keep its name, there is a chance that this change affects the perception of people on the company.
Another thing to remember here is that Facebook is not the only one who underwent this process. Let's take a look at some of the other technology companies that changed its name in their past.
First of all, we should note that in general name changes happen within the first years of a company, mainly because it gets acquired by another company or as a part of their innovation move.
For example in the 1990s Kentucky Fried Chicken slowly started to change its name to KFC in a subtle way, in an attempt to drop using the word "fried", which was perceived as unhealthy. Or in the 2000s the World Wrestling Federation changed its name to World Wrestling Entertainment, after a dispute with the World Wildlife Fund organization about the WWF acronym.
Technology world witnessed these kinds of phenemenon in the past too, like these five companies that tried to change its name, four of which has succeeded while one failed in the process.
Yahoo! (1995)
Alternative name: Jerry's guide to the world wide web
Yahoo! is one of the pioneers of the internet and everyone knows its name. However, before becoming the popular search engine that we all know, it had a less catchy name: Jerry's guide to the world wide web.
The name was given by Jerry Yang, who cofounded the website with David Filo in 1994, after graduating from Stanford. Later, in 1995, they chose the Yahoo! as the definitive name.
Netflix (2011)
Alternative name: Qwikster
Netflix was founded in 1997 as a company that focuses on renting DVDs through mail, but after a decade it begun to offer content streaming which it carries on doing until today.
In 2011, the company announced a %60 rise in its projects and divided its services as Netflix, platform for streaming, and Qwikster, which focuses on DVDs.
But the company faced with an general refusal of the decision, which forced the company to leave this rise invalid and depart from Qwikster, sparking a lot of controversy at the time.
Amazon
Alternative name: Cadabra
Amazon started as an electronic commerce company, but today it has one of the biggest cloud storage platforms, a major video streaming service and it also manufactures various technological home products.
However, the original idea of Jeff Bezos was to denominate the platform as Cadabra, as an abbreviate of the catchphrase of mages "abracadabra". But this idea did not come to life as a lawyer warned that in English it is easy to confuse this term with "cadaver".
Eventually, he chose Amazon, with reference to "the exotic and different" which originally is the South American Amazon.
Google (1997)
Alternative name: BackRub
It is very probable that BackRub doesn't mean anything to you. But it was the first name of the search engine that would eventually become Google. However in 1997, when the brands and names were going to be registered, Larry Page and Sergey Brin opted to go with now well-known Google.
Later, in 2015, parent company Google Inc became Alphabet Inc, marking its second name change, with a similar move that was made by Facebook Inc with Meta in 2021.
Sony (1958)
Alternative name: Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, Totsuko
In 1946, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded Sony with the name Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Even though they later started to use casually the acronym "Totsuko", it was very difficult word to pronounce especially for Americans.
In 1958, they renamed it as Sony, a combination of the Latin word "sonus", meaning sounds, and "sonny boys", which is an American slang borrowed by Japanese people to refer to an "intelligent young person".
