The general rule for naming a company is that you want something as unique as possible. If you name your company something generic, your company won’t come up on search results and it will be difficult to identify.
But sometimes you want to be obfuscated. You may not want your company to show up in search results or official documents as easily.
Take Blackwater, the infamous military contractor best known for an incident in 2007 in which a number of their employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians. This was during the height of anti-Iraq war protests and a lot of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were coming in to shed light on the secrative organization and their relationship with the US Government.
In 2009, they changed their name to Xe Services in part to obfuscate their presence. The name Blackwater helped them getting off the ground as it sounded very serious and dangerous. But when they established themselves as a “competent” military contractor, they could do away with the name for a more banal name. Even today, googling “Xe” returns mostly the foreign exchange company Xe. And at some point government contracts contained the new company’s name, making searching for their relationships harder.
Newspapers continued to call the company “the company formerly known as Blackwater” however, so the move wasn’t full-proof but it helped. In 2009, they changed their name again to Academi, which is almost comical. Imagine the headlines: Iraqi civilizians killed by Academi.
Google had a similar name change to Alphabet in 2015. It sounds less nefarious when you read Alphabet has vast amounts of information on nearly all Americans.
Facebook will likely change its name soon and my guess is that it’ll be similarly generic. I’m thinking something like The Graph or The Network or maybe even FB. Their products will keep their original names to avoid confusion. But when looking at the entity as a whole, you’ll see their new generic name.
Facebook had the opposite approach when they started branding Instagram as “Instagram by Facebook”, which I thought was odd at the time. But I think they’re reversing direction as more scrutiny is put on the company.
Will it have the desired effect? Who knows. But its clever.