Google’s Alphabet Rebranding Didn’t Actually Fail
In ATP 607, the hosts discussed about Meta's Orion glasses. During the discussion, Marco mentioned that Meta has a pretty overall successful rebranding. John responded with Meta's "renaming is going better than Alphabet for sure". No one will disagree with John here, but it's actually comparing apples and oranges.
Meta is now the company, with Facebook being just one of its products.
On the other hand, Alphabet is a holding company, and Google is both a product and a company under its umbrella. Other companies like Waymo also fall under Alphabet. When Alphabet was formed, it was intentionally designed to not have any products associated with it.
How do I know about this? I worked on Abseil Common Libraries. It's an open-source collection of common C++ and Python libraries widely used by Google internally. The project was funded nine years ago as a result of Alphabet's formation, with the goal of sharing common infrastructures between Google and other Alphabet companies. Because of this mission, the project was initially named Alphabet Common Libraries. C++ used abcl:: as the namespace and Python used abcl as the package name. However during the launch review, the branding team rejected the name as it went against the policy. We had to change the name before the launch. We decided to change one letter to the C++ namespace and Python package so the code refactoring we had to do was easier. The new name is spelled as absl and we walked backwards from the pronunciation of absl to the word abseil.
All I'm trying to say is, Alphabet wasn't a rebranding effort because Alphabet isn't supposed to be a brand. The rebranding didn't actually fail because there is no rebranding in the first place.
Now you might think I'm just defending Google. No. Even though there was no rebranding, everyone thinks this was a failed rebranding attempt. This is what matters. This is actually very on brand of Google that it doesn't do well in PR, marketing, and branding. Meta, on the other hand, is better at this.