The Meta Company. Oh no, wait, the new company who go by the name Meta knowingly stamped all over the existing Meta Company.
For the last three months, Facebook lawyers have been hounding us to sell our name to them. We refused their offer on multiple bases. Namely, the low offer wouldn’t cover the costs of changing our name, and we insisted on knowing the client and intent, which they did not want to disclose.
At least two law firms were involved: One in the USA that requested our trademark and domains (Kilpatrick, Townsend & Stockton), and the other in Europe aggressively contacting trying to get us to sell our domain registrations (Hogan Lovells).
On October 20th, 2021, during a phone call with Facebook attorneys, we declined their low offer and maintained our requirements. At this point, we presumed it was Facebook and identified them on the call. The attorney representing Facebook declared they would respect our existing right and registration.
On October 28th, 2021, Facebook decided to commit trademark infringement and call themselves “Meta”.
They couldn’t buy us, so they tried to bury us by force of media. We shouldn’t be surprised by these actions — from a company that continually says one thing and does another. Facebook and its operating officers are deceitful and acting in bad faith, not only towards us, but to all of humanity.
For what it’s worth, bankrupt or not, generally speaking they retain all their assets they haven’t sold, including their name.
Like my dad owned a booming business through the 90s, and in like 2003 he sold all the accounts to a competitor and signed a non compete WRT, those clients, effectively closing doors. (About a decade later the non compete expired and he resumed business with some of his old clients) In the interim he continued to use his effectively non existent companies letterhead, credit line, non account assets, etc, just in the course of his life as a semi retired consultant.
If some asshat post 2003’d come along and said, “stop using your company letterhead and reputation because we’re big tech and we have lawyers”, I’d still call that being stamped all over.
As our 45th demonstrated, image matters a lot more than material in the business world, and messing with someone’s image (such as saying you can’t use it anymore, 'cause we wanna name ourselves) is a dick move.
This is a winded way of saying, kinda regardless of the status of meta’s pre 2021 internet presence, or solvency, or whatever, just takin’ their shit (for reasons other than redistribution to the workers) is fucked up. If we’re gonna play this capitalism game, then according to the rules, facebook’s fuckin’ up.
Meta that Cremlain brought up doesn’t appear to be connected. Nor do any of the other dozen or so companies named meta.
In fact, Metacompany appears to have basically no digital footprint outside of this announcement, nor any traces - ie, people mentioning them, any sort of other little odds and ends that accumulate on the internet - previous to this. Which is, needless to say, incredibly suspicious of a company of the size they’re pretending to be these days, and if you factor in the length of time they’ve supposedly been around, since 2014, I’d even venture that it’s the next best thing to impossible.
Microsoft Teams is the operating system that can have an extra layer of VR on top, but there is a graceful fallback to webcam and monitor for compatibility.
This is exactly how MS-DOS was the operating system that, with Windows, could have a layer of GUI on top, but when Windows was introduced 99% of programs and tasks needed to run right from the command line.
Microsoft doesn’t need to make its own hardware. Once there is a solid business case for VR, OEMs will see a market like “A PC on every desk” they’ll start delivering.
Hololens was/is always going to win the corporate/industrial/military contract side of it first and then I figured they would drive the price/accessibility down for the mass market after they had essentially subsidized further development with those lucrative contracts.
HoloLens has a very, very, very small market compared to “everyone in this company who is already on Microsoft teams gets a headset to work from home”. I’m not convinced HoloLens is relevant to the future of VR or Microsoft’s future.
Then get fucked. People around the world often cause damage greater than they can afford to repair. Uninsured low income people crash their car into a Ferrari.
If you cause a genocide amount of damage, the justice demands a genocide amount of suffering. In my book, that’s infinity dollars of damage. The only justice would be for him to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
Facebook’s market cap is above that. FB is being sued as a company, not Zuck personally.
Market capitalization of Meta (Facebook) (FB)
Market cap: $897.31 Billion
As of December 2021 Meta (Facebook) has a market cap of $897.31 Billion. This makes Meta (Facebook) the world’s 7th most valuable company by market cap according to our data. The market capitalization, commonly called market cap, is the total market value of a publicly traded company’s outstanding shares and is commonly used to mesure how much a company is worth.
