A while back I evaluated using Google's AI products for my company and this is barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to confusing naming. I left so confused after a few days that I decided there was no way I could inflict that on anyone else in the company. I think the were some good ideas in there but I couldn't tell you which of the ~40 (at least) similarly named products those were.
I did wind up choosing GCP to be our primary enterprise AI provider and it has definitely been a challenge to try and explain the difference between Vertex AI Studio, Gemini Enterprise, and Gemini Enterprise Code Assist, to say nothing of trying to explain that these three products are not the same thing as the consumer version of Gemini that they can find when they google “Gemini AI”. The branding is godawful.
If I had to guess, it’s an ownership issue. There’s an enterprise team, a consumer team, a cloud team, etc. so there’s no single vision and plan. Which could be okay, but then each of those teams likely has not been given the authority to develop their own branding or naming and just defaults to using whatever is available, pre-canned.
Honestly I think it’s just a Microsoft and Google problem. Microsoft has been terrible at branding for as long as I can remember, and Google seems like they’ve been slowly turning into Microsoft over the years in more ways than just poor product naming.