Google's changed a lot in the past few years, going from underselling their efforts to shamelessly promoting themselves as leaders, even when it's leadership over initiatives that are still very tenuous or nascent. The best example to me was looking at the Android effort, backed as it is by the grandly-named Open Handset Alliance, and accompanied by a slickly-designed logo and some obviously careful branding work.
I can't help but feel if Google had launched the exact same effort two or three years ago, it would have simply been called "Google Pack Mobile". I'm not sure that would have been any better, and it may well have been worse, but what's remarkable is how complete the transformation has been.
It's called an Ad Agency.
Wasn't a lot of this branding simply won in translation as a result of Google's purchase of Android in 2005?
Growing up changes us, people and organizations and it was Mohammad Ali who once said:
"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
I guess it can be extrapolated or at least paraphrased as "an organization who views the world at 10 the same way they did at 2 has wasted 8 years of its enterprise".
I still like Google, still don't really get Yahoo and I also love the growing accouterments listed in the sidebar of this blog as "ELSEWHERE", though how much of that can be accomplished through one personal relational database?
IMHO branding today is simply house decor for intelligencia and rope-a-dope for idiocracy, and not to mention that even Mohammed Ali went from legendary icon to a branded one.
M.