The Rebrand Is the Product

There's a specific flavor of fatigue that comes from working with Google's stack. It isn't the fatigue of a flaky test suite or a standup that ran long. It's the fatigue of reopening a bookmarked doc and discovering the product it describes now answers to a completely different name.

Here's what tipped me over this week.

A Chatbot With Three Birth Certificates

It launched as Bard. Cute, literary, a little cheeky for a chatbot.

Then it became Google Bard with Gemini Pro bolted on as the underlying model — a transition period nobody asked for, where the product name and the model name lived in the same sentence like awkward roommates.

Then, within the year, Bard was retired outright and everything folded into Gemini. Not "Gemini by Bard." Just Gemini, as if Bard had never been the front door at all. The model absorbed the app. I updated my slides twice and then gave up updating them a third time.

This Isn't a One-Off. It's a Pattern.

If Bard-to-Gemini were the whole story, fine, I'd move on. But Google treats naming the way some people treat New Year's resolutions.

G Suite → Google Workspace — same apps, same Docs and Sheets and Slides, suddenly wrapped in a name that sounds like a co-working space rather than a productivity suite.

Google Cloud Platform's console — services get renamed mid-flight often enough that half the tutorials online reference a menu item that's since moved, merged, or vanished into "unified" dashboards.

Hangouts → Google Chat, Duo → Google Meet — two messaging products consolidated into one, except the consolidation itself took multiple attempts, and for a while there were three different apps doing overlapping jobs under three different names.

Someone, somewhere, probably has a spreadsheet tracking every Google product that's been killed, merged, or renamed since 2010. It would be a long spreadsheet.

The Annoying Part Is That the Reasons Are Good

Every single rename comes with a coherent explanation. Gemini absorbed Bard because the model became the product — there was no longer a meaningful line between "the AI" and "the app around the AI." Workspace replaced G Suite because the apps had grown past being a mere office bundle into a collaboration platform with AI features stitched through all of them.

In isolation, each decision is defensible. Stitched together across a decade, they add up to a graveyard of half-familiar names that developers, IT admins, and end users all have to relearn on a rolling basis.

The Cost Isn't Confusion. It's Attention.

Rename a product once, and people update their mental map. Rename it every year or two, and people quietly stop bothering to learn the new name — they just wait for the next one, treating every current name as provisional.

I've caught myself writing "Gemini (formerly Bard, née Google Assistant's chattier cousin)" in onboarding docs, like I'm annotating a family tree instead of writing a tutorial. Every explanation now needs a footnote acknowledging the ghost of the old name.

And underneath all of it, the actual infrastructure barely moves. The APIs, the auth flows, the billing SKUs mostly persist across the rebrand. So once again: the rename disrupts nothing that runs and everything that's written down.

So, Google — One Tired Developer to You

I'm not saying never rename anything. Products change shape, and names occasionally should follow.

I'm asking for restraint. Pick a name, let it sit long enough that a Stack Overflow answer from three years ago is still useful. Let a name outlive a single product cycle before you retire it.

Just let me finish one onboarding doc before it's obsolete.

And if this changed again between me writing this and you reading it — no. Stop that.