The problem is that Facebook and Instagram are "the old thing" and WhatsApp monetization ja hard without pushing users to Signal (or Apple iMessage) while kids spend their time on TikTok instead. Facebook needs to find the next thing after TikTok to pull future generations of users in. And from their view a new world offers tons of ways to monetize.
No end-users I asked over the years knew IG was an FB product. FB could have managed the same thing if building whatever the next big thing needed to happen again.
The wholesale rename of everything is necessary when you're trying to distance yourself from a poisoned past. It's not just about end-users, it's about recruiting and retaining talented employees. The sooner they can make folks disassociate the entire operation from the bad FB name the better. Many engineers aren't interested in telling their friends/family they work for FB, that awful company that enabled the CA scandal etc. Now they'd be able to say they work for Meta, that VR company.
The problem is that Facebook and Instagram are "the old thing" and WhatsApp monetization ja hard without pushing users to Signal (or Apple iMessage) while kids spend their time on TikTok instead. Facebook needs to find the next thing after TikTok to pull future generations of users in. And from their view a new world offers tons of ways to monetize.