Google's Infinite Rebranding Service
Description
This is the second part of a satirical Twitter thread. Michael Parker's tweet asks whether an invitation will be for "Google Meet" or "Google Meet (original)?", showing a screenshot with two identically-named apps in an app store. Sacha Sayan's reply escalates the joke by listing the convoluted naming history of Google's office suite: "Google Workspace, formerly GSuite, otherwise known as Google Apps for Work, previously Google Apps Premier Edition, aka Gmail for Your Domain". The meme humorously criticizes Google's notorious and confusing product branding strategy, where products are frequently renamed, merged, or duplicated, causing user frustration. It's a relatable pain point for anyone who has tried to keep up with Google's ever-changing product landscape
Comments
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Google's product strategy is just A/B testing brand names in production, with their entire user base as the control group
Nothing like scheduling a call in Meet-v9-LTS-original-classic to remind us that ‘backward compatibility’ at Google is just marketing’s way of versioning namespaces
Google's naming strategy is what happens when you let the same team that deprecated 200 products also handle brand continuity - now we need a service mesh just to figure out which Meet to meet on
This perfectly captures the enterprise software experience: when your company's video conferencing solution requires a PhD in Google product archaeology to determine which deprecated rebrand of a sunset feature that was merged with a discontinued service you're actually supposed to install. Bonus points if your IT department's documentation still references Hangouts
Only Google ships a naming collision to prod and labels the deprecated path "original"; now MDM asks which Meet to provision, calendars hit merge conflicts, and we’ve invented SemVer for branding
Google's 'original' Meet: the enterprise fork no Kubernetes cluster can orchestrate away
Google achieved eventual consistency in branding - Duo became Meet and Meet became “Meet (original)”; now my calendar needs a service mesh to route the join link