On 16 July, Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. On 4 September it began removing Google Assistant from Android phones and putting Gemini in its place. In the five months before that it had folded Vertex AI into something called the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, given Gemini CLI users thirty days to move to Antigravity CLI, and stopped new sign-ups for Firebase Studio ahead of shutting it down. That is roughly one rename or retirement a month, from a company whose models I rate as highly as anyone’s.

The technology is excellent. Keeping track of what it is called has become a job in its own right.

The ledger

The chain is long enough to need a table, which is the first sign something has gone wrong.

Bard became Gemini in February 2024, and Duet AI for Workspace became Gemini for Workspace in the same post. Search Generative Experience shipped as AI Overviews three months later. Project IDX was folded into Firebase Studio in April 2025, and Firebase Studio is now sunsetting on 22 March 2027, with users pointed at Google AI Studio or Antigravity depending on what they were doing. Project Tailwind became NotebookLM, which became Gemini Notebook. Vertex AI, the name every enterprise buyer had finally learned, became the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform in April, with all future Vertex work delivered “exclusively through the Agent Platform”. Gemini CLI was switched off on 18 June for free, Pro, and Ultra users, one month after the announcement, in favour of Antigravity CLI. Google Assistant, a brand with a decade of consumer recognition, went on 4 September.

Alongside the renames sits the live catalogue: Gemini, Gemini Live, Gemini Code Assist, Gemini Enterprise, Google AI Studio, Gemma, Jules, Antigravity, Project Astra, Project Mariner, Flow, Veo, Imagen, Nano Banana, Lyria, and AI Mode. Some of those are models, some are products, some are research previews, and one is a banana. The list will be out of date before this piece is indexed.

The decision guide rotted first

The cost of all this sits upstream of product quality, in the work a person has to do before using any of it: picking one.

A buyer who hears “Gemini” could be hearing about the model, the assistant, the Workspace add-on, the coding tool, or the platform, and at the moment it is all five. A developer building software has to choose between Gemini Code Assist, Jules, Antigravity, AI Studio, and the Enterprise Agent Platform. Google Cloud’s own blog tried to help in August 2025 with a post titled “Here’s which Google AI developer tool to use for each situation”. It listed seven tools and opened with “It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.” Within a year one of the seven had been shut down and another closed to new users, so the guide went stale before most readers had finished choosing.

Compare the mental model a buyer needs for the two main competitors. OpenAI is ChatGPT, plus Codex for code. Anthropic is Claude, plus Claude Code. Anthropic launched a third surface, Claude Cowork, in January and this month folded it back into Claude, saying the Cowork name will disappear. Anthropic has fewer product names now than it had in January. Google has never had a year like that.

Neither competitor is clean everywhere. OpenAI’s model names are a running joke, and Sam Altman said in February 2025 that his team “hates the model picker as much as you do” and that the company’s offerings had got too complicated. The difference is where the mess lives. A confusing model picker sits inside a product with one name. Google’s confusion starts at the front door.

Naming is part of the product

This is where it matters for anyone building a company, and it is why the post is on this site rather than a gadget blog.

Every rename is a migration you impose on your customers. The Gemini CLI change gave people thirty days before their scripts stopped working. The Firebase Studio sunset gives them nine months to move a workspace. Each one is a small tax on adoption paid by the people who trusted you enough to build on the previous name, and the tax compounds: the next time you launch something, the buyer who has been burned twice waits to see whether it survives.

A sprawling product map is also an organisation chart in disguise. Sixteen live brand names usually means sixteen teams with sixteen launch calendars and nobody whose job is the whole. Conway’s law runs all the way to the marketing page.

For a startup the lesson is the boring one. Pick one front door and put everything behind it. Name the thing for what the buyer is trying to do, and keep the project codename inside the building. Rename only when the old name is actively misleading, and never rename the same thing twice. Count your nouns once a quarter, and if the count went up, ask who benefited.

Google has extraordinary research, models, and engineering. Customers have stopped asking which of its AI products is best and started asking what it is called this week. Another brand would make that worse. What Google’s customers need is a product map a normal person can hold in their head.

If your customers need a glossary before they can buy from you, we can help you fix the map.