I've always attributed this sort of thing to companies outgrowing any form of manageable structure. At a scale like google, each team gets so distant from various parts of other parts of the company and the management structure gets so deep that the whole thing kinda becomes a zombie. Each part is kinda stuck in its own myopic view of the world with no oversight. Like, if you had an org where the only thing you made was AI tools, you would probably have common branding and the CEO would spend real time trying to get the naming right, but Sundar probably forgets they even made Notebook LM.

Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.

Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.

They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.

I would imagine it's just a branding/marketing thing so that the product is directly associated by consumers as being within the Gemini ecosystem (and thus Google) from the product name alone. NotebookLM doesn't convey that, but Gemini Notebook does.

I've seen this sort of thing happen when something starts small and no one cares and then it gets traction. Eg: If you have a tiny toy project that the engineers call one thing, you might publish it under that name. If it then gets the attention of some higher level marketing team, you might rebrand it to align with the rest of the company.

No idea if that happened here or in google generally.

Google seems to have competing orgs especially when something becomes a company-wide priority. Before it was chat apps, now it's AI. Idk if it's intentional, but it did seem that way with Jetski vs Gemini CLI, where they decided Jetski was better and nixed the other. Also ChromeOS vs Android.