Google has caught MMD (Microsoft Marketing Disease), in which companies endlessly rebrand and rename products that are successful, but not market-leading, in an effort to become the market leader, but end up fragmenting their own brands further by alienating existing loyal users and confusing late-adopters and casual observers who don't follow the branding news. This marketing-driven disease spreads to other parts of the business, as engineers see a rebranding as a legitimate time to break backwards-compatibility, but they aren't given the lead-time or budget for a full rework, so the new product is similar enough to the old product that it's obviously just a rehash, but different enough so that nothing that worked with the old thing will easily work with the new thing.
MMD keeps managers, marketers, product teams, and engineering leads busy, and makes executives believe progress is being made since all the metrics look good: there are tech blog articles, Twitter mentions, Hacker News threads, maybe a mainstream media hit or two; all the teams have finite task lists that are getting done; and there's an initial jump in brand awareness and new user engagement. The actual damage to the brand doesn't happen until long enough down the road that the brilliant minds who came up with the idea have collected their bonus checks, awards, and promotions, and moved onto better things.
And now the executives start talking up the need for a new marketing strategy... lather, rinse, repeat.
MMD keeps managers, marketers, product teams, and engineering leads busy, and makes executives believe progress is being made since all the metrics look good: there are tech blog articles, Twitter mentions, Hacker News threads, maybe a mainstream media hit or two; all the teams have finite task lists that are getting done; and there's an initial jump in brand awareness and new user engagement. The actual damage to the brand doesn't happen until long enough down the road that the brilliant minds who came up with the idea have collected their bonus checks, awards, and promotions, and moved onto better things.
And now the executives start talking up the need for a new marketing strategy... lather, rinse, repeat.