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Ask HN: Is entertainment getting the Google Chat treatment?

2 points by jfoster ↗ HN
Today I received an email from Google informing me that "Play Movies & TV is moving to Google TV" and was curious about when the announcement was made, so I went Googling for it and instead found this:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/102498448?hl=en

So, there used to be Play Movies & TV, which was an offshoot of Google Play, and now it's become YouTube, but it's also become Google TV, but Google TV used to be the Android-based OS that ran on some smart TVs, but those TVs now need to use YouTube for the same functionality?

Is Google benefiting from naming churn somehow? It doesn't seem to have helped them with chat, but now they're trying it for their entertainment stuff? Why?

3 comments

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arkitaip
Organizational entropy manifests itself in many ways, one of which is the constantly fucking around with existing products without creating any real value. Add in-house warfare between various teams over corporate benefits and resources and you end up with a culture where it totally makes sense to rename and rearrange products all the time.
jfoster
I feel like that explains why it happened with chat. That it's now happening with their entertainment offerings suggests nothing was learnt.

The organisational incentives might be structured such that it will continue, but surely leadership would've put something in place to prevent recurrence, despite those incentives? I would expect every launch, shutdown & rebrand to now be going through senior leadership approval, but maybe that hasn't happened yet.