Google culture is hiring the smartest or most motivated college grads, paying them to babysit legacy money printing systems built by the generation before them, then occasionally encouraging them to team up and clone popular services from other companies and startups.
The clones get passed around the campus for dogfooding until enough interest builds up and the project goes up the chain of command until a VP (at the time Marissa) signs off on it with notes on what to improve along with granting the necessary resources to spin it up.
Then if someone decides the project has legs they figure out how to engineer it for Google's audience and launch. If it doesn't work then the team disperse and move on to another project. Or it works and the team gets a moment in the sun.
Every single popular thing on the internet has a Google clone somewhere in the intranet.
It's an unfortunate situation for Google product engineers. It's basically a competition. It has some benefit and has some really big downside. If my reference is correct, usually there are more than one team building the same product (e.g. Google Plus).
Apple felt more like a newspaper agency. Many teams contribute for various sections, many compete to be above the fold, then Steve Jobs acting as editor in chief determines what the ledes are.
There was a separation of business and content creators but since they don't rely on advertising to pay the bills the content creators got more freedom and resources to play with than a traditional newspaper firm.
Some things end up in different box than they were in before when you cleaning up your house. Have you never moved your code from one package to another?
This is an exceptionally strong argument for having your internal and external representations separate. So that every fucking reorg or personnel shift doesn't require 3 billion people to update bookmarks and Web apps and password safes.
Some companies just can't get their branding straight. They launch a video product, then buy one, then try to keep them separate, then try to merge them, then kill one.
Or they launch any of a bazillion interactive chat apps, each worse than the first, and keep killing them off. Then wonder why people don't use them.
They have a secret sauce money machine and start fucking with it.
They create a fear-driven paranoia taillight chaser, set up really stupid rules about engagement, drive off their highly enthusiastic early-adopter crowd, try to cram it down everyone's throats, allow 2 billion random strangers on the Internet to set Calendar appointments (Scoble's blast at Slic Vic was classic), and mix a bazillion random Internet freaks with your personal email contacts.
They shove cameras into the world's face and the world bitchslaps them for it, rightly.
And that's the piddling stuff.
Then they create smoke alarms that cannot be turned off, thermostats that can't work without Internet, and buy, then sell, a war-making robot-terminator-dog company.
And they expect us to believe them that their Majick Cars will be bugproof, un-annoying, and non-lethal.
I think they'll find that when the time comes, the letter H will be well occupied by Hubris.
A lot of companies I have seen so far don't always rebrand. They simply announce new release. IMO, it's actually better to announce new release than to rebrand. When you rebrand and offer similar feature, you are basically telling your user you are not committed to build anything long term. This is like building APIs. Users don't really care if your API is now running on a Linux host or on a Windows host, coded in Python or coded in Go. You do the refactoring transparent to users. Imagine your car's manufacturer is sold and re-brand every two years, how would you feel about your car?
