I've always attributed this sort of thing to companies outgrowing any form of manageable structure. At a scale like google, each team gets so distant from various parts of other parts of the company and the management structure gets so deep that the whole thing kinda becomes a zombie. Each part is kinda stuck in its own myopic view of the world with no oversight. Like, if you had an org where the only thing you made was AI tools, you would probably have common branding and the CEO would spend real time trying to get the naming right, but Sundar probably forgets they even made Notebook LM.

Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.

Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.

They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.

Sundar did know about all the chat apps though. It's one thing to have internally competing things, but that shouldn't be exposed to end users. I never had a lot of confidence in his leadership either, seemed like autopilot.