TL;DR: Google’s recent quiet rebranding of NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook is just the latest symptom of a massive, systemic identity crisis. From flip-flopping smart home names to killing the beloved Nexus line, Google’s constant urge to rename—and ultimately abandon—its products mid-lifecycle is exhausting its users and tanking brand loyalty.
You log into NotebookLM today, looking to generate a quick podcast or organize your research, and what do you see? A shiny new coat of paint and a brand new name: Gemini Notebook.
It’s classic Google. Just when a product starts gaining massive, organic word-of-mouth momentum, the marketing suits in Mountain View panic. They decide that instead of letting a great product build its own organic brand equity, it must immediately be assimilated into whatever the company’s current corporate keyword obsession is. Right now, that keyword is Gemini.
But this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a multi-decade habit of product renaming, walkbacks, and sudden cancellations that makes investing in the Google ecosystem feel like playing Russian roulette with your digital life.
1. The Smart Home Whiplash: Google Home to Nest, and Back Again
If you’ve tried to build a smart home over the last decade, Google has given you chronic whiplash.
- First, they released the Google Home speaker.
- Then, they bought Nest, panicked, and decided everything had to be “Google Nest.” Your Google Home Hub suddenly became the Nest Hub, and your account migration was forced.
- Then, they started walking features back, slowly phasing out the classic Nest app in favor of you guessed it the Google Home app.
They built one of the best ecosystems on the market, only to spend five years confusing normal consumers who just wanted their hallway light to turn on.
2. The Developer Carousel: Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI
This isn’t just happening to mainstream consumers; developers are getting dragged through the mud, too.
- Google built up the Gemini CLI to give developers a powerful terminal-native assistant.
- Almost as soon as devs integrated it into their daily workflows, Google announced that Gemini CLI is being retired.
- The replacement? Antigravity CLI.
It is faster and more capable, but the psychological fatigue is real. Developers want stability. When you change the core terminal commands they use to run their pipelines, they don’t get excited—they get annoyed.
3. The Great Hardware Shuffle: Nexus, Chromebooks, and the Pixel Mess
Do you remember when Google hardware was simple?
- The Nexus Era: The Nexus phones were legendary. They were cheap, clean, developer-friendly, and universally loved. Google killed them to launch Pixel.
- The Laptop Identity Crisis: We went from the premium Chromebook Pixel to the hybrid Pixelbook, which was quietly discontinued in 2022. Now, there are whispers of a new generation of AI-centric laptops called Googlebooks.
- The Fitbit Erasure: Google bought Fitbit—a brand with nearly 100% household recognition—and has steadily tried to choke the life out of its independent identity, forcing Google Account logins and steering everyone toward the unified Google Pixel Watch ecosystem.
The Core Problem: Why This is Killing Their Products
Google’s defenders will tell you this is all about “unification” and “streamlining.” They want a single, cohesive brand identity.
But at this point, it feels like they do it just to do it. Changing product names mid-lifecycle doesn’t streamline anything; it just dilutes search engine power, confuses the average buyer, and breaks the emotional connection users have with their tools.
When a company’s product names are as temporary and unreliable as their actual release lifecycles, users stop investing. Why spend hours setting up your life in a Google ecosystem when you don’t even know if the app will exist—or what it will be called—by this time next year?
