After 17 years, Zuckerberg takes the lead with Facebook, "Like," and "Meta."

Facebook, the world's No. 1 social media company, recently changed its name to Meta, declaring that it will be transformed into a "metabus (virtual world where social, cultural, and economic activities such as reality)" company. Meta is usually used as a prefix in the English-speaking world and has an transcendent meaning. The company also announced its logo, which means infinity. Changing the mission deeply embedded in the public's perception for 17 years since its establishment in 2004 means that it is seeing the future on Metabus.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized Meta's blueprint at the annual developer forum "Facebook Connect 2021" held on the 28th (local time), saying, "We have changed from the desktop era to the mobile era, from text to photos and videos, but this is not the end." In the meantime, Facebook's core services, Instagram and WhatsApp, have been labeled "From Facebook," but they are boldly taking it off and trying to brand it anew. Earlier in 2014, CEO Zuckerberg acquired Oculus VR, a virtual reality (VR) headset manufacturer, for $2.3 billion (about 2.5 trillion won), and said, "Today's platform is mobile, but it's time to prepare for tomorrow's platform." Zuckerberg vowed at the time that "there will be a big change in 10 to 15 years at the latest," but it is observed that he may have decided that he could lead the metaverse platform through Oculus in seven years.

The mission called Meta is interpreted as an ambition to increase its dominance in the market by borrowing key etymologies from the metaverse ecosystem, which is still in its early days. Just as Google's search engine is used as an expression for searching, there is a possibility that Meta will also be used as an expression for playing on Metaverse.

The competition in the metaverse market ultimately depends on who controls the hardware platform. If you catch the platform, you can preoccupy the market. From that point of view, it is encouraging to Facebook that the number of users of Oculus, a VR platform, has increased significantly. In August, Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook's reality lab, announced, "We will achieve the goal of 10 million Oculus users early." Upload VR media VR is also expected to fill 10 million users by the end of this year.

Apple's total iPhone sales in 2008 when the third generation (3G) was released were 11.63 million units. Considering that Metabus is in the early stages of the market, it can be seen that Facebook has caught as many platform users as it secured from iPhones in the early days of mobile.

Date: 2021-10-22

Reporter: 신정훈