A Brief History of Google's Branding Labyrinth
Description
This image is a screenshot of a Twitter thread that satirizes Google's notoriously confusing product strategy and constant rebranding. The first tweet, from Thomas Kurian, announces a new AI offering called 'Gemini Business'. A user named Sacha Sayan replies with a sarcastic question, asking if he can pay for it using 'Google Pay in Google Wallet, which replaced Google Pay, which replaced Android Pay, formerly known as Google Wallet?'. In a follow-up reply, Sayan doubles down on the joke, offering to discuss billing over 'Google Meet, the enterprise Google Chat, previously Duo, which replaced Allo, the replacement for Hangouts, the rebrand of +Hangouts, which replaced Talk and Voice.' The humor stems from the accurate and dizzying recitation of the convoluted histories of Google's payment and communication apps. For experienced developers, this is a deeply relatable frustration, as it highlights the 'product churn' and lack of long-term vision that often leads to deprecated services, forced migrations, and a fragmented developer experience when working with Google's ecosystem
Comments
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Google's product strategy is based on Schrödinger's app: it's simultaneously launching, deprecated, and being rebranded until you check the docs, at which point it's been replaced by a new service you have to migrate to yesterday
Google’s product map is starting to look like an eventually-consistent database - give it enough time and the names might converge… or get garbage-collected
The only thing more complex than our microservices dependency graph is explaining to the CFO why we need to migrate from Duet AI to Gemini Business before it becomes Bard Enterprise and circles back to being called Google AI Studio Classic
This thread perfectly captures Google's product strategy: a recursive function with no base case, where each product replacement is defined in terms of its predecessor, eventually stack-overflowing into a naming convention that would make even the most convoluted legacy codebase look well-documented. At this rate, senior engineers spend more time tracking Google's product genealogy than managing their own microservices dependency graphs - and that's saying something when you're running Kubernetes on top of Kubernetes because the first layer got deprecated
Google's rebrands outpace feature velocity - docs obsolete before merge, integrations chase ghosts like deprecated APIs
Google branding is a CNAME chain with no A record: finance buys “Gemini Business” via Wallet→Pay→Wallet while kickoff happens in Meet→Chat→Duo→Allo→Hangouts→Talk - eventually consistent branding, zero canonical schema
Google’s naming scheme is basically a distributed system - renames propagate asynchronously, and procurement retries with exponential backoff until Wallet and Pay eventually converge