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A comment on Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand. Parent comment

Re:Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand by thesausageking on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @01:45PM (#28933595)
They need to convince people to buy into, but the technology itself doesn't need to be real. Not in the 5 year time frame.

Tesla's self-driving product is a great example of this. They got consumers to buy into the vision of self-driving cars way before it was actually ready. This allowed them to sell a lot more cars and pre-orders as well as have a narrative for investors to pump their stock. If they get FSD to work, it will be great. But, even if it never is a successful product, they've benefitted tremendously from the narrative itself and have been able to turn it into sales and cheap capital to invest in the business.

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Re:Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand by SideburnsOfDoom on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @02:32PM (#28934270)
> They need to convince people to buy into, but the technology itself doesn't need to be real.

Maybe. But on the other hand, Tesla was starting out with a _lot_ more user goodwill than FaceBook.

Tesla isn't perfect, they have (IMHO) a good basic product, but with some build quality issues, labour issues, over-promising self-driving issues etc, and yet ... these issues have not shifted the narrative from basically favourable. Part of me still wants one, even though I know it's not going to drive itself. Maybe narratives are sticky?

So, FaceBook is going into this with a massively negative narrative. Shifting it will be hard. We're all really cynical about FaceBook already.

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