Android: Going, Going, Gone (Premium)

Just as Microsoft did with Windows, Surface, and other brands, Google is now quietly deemphasizing the term "Android" in favor of its corporate brand.

This shift is the branding equivalent of sweeping some dust under a rug before the guests arrive. And as was the case with Microsoft's shift, this is all about consolidating under a single, cohesive, and well-respected brand that has fewer ties to a questionable and sometimes embarrassing past.

That is, while Android is dominant in smartphones, the Android brand has not helped the platform move successfully to related markets for tablets, wearables, or Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home devices. Likewise, adding "Android" to its software and services brands has been equally unsuccessful, and likely to instantly turn off those using, say, an iOS device. Users trust Google in the cloud. Android? Eh.

I'm reminded of Microsoft's cross-platform nadir, when it released something with the bone-headed name Windows Media Player for Mac. You can imagine how well that product fared. And how much Google wants to avoid alienating its users in a similar fashion.

How serious is Google about removing the "Android" brand? It has entirely recast its tablet efforts around Chrome OS, which can now run Android apps. It has renamed Android Pay to Google Pay, and it has likewise renamed various apps, like Messages, that once had the word Android in their names. It renamed the Android Wear platform to Wear OS. And it is using the Google brand, and not Android, on virtually all of its new product and offerings.

But the most amazing example of this Pravda-like rewriting of history is something I missed: As 9to5Google points out, Google's presenters did not utter the word "Android"---even once---at this past week's Made By Google hardware event.

Folks, that is astonishing.

Even Microsoft, in its current mad bid to push Microsoft 365, frequently uses the word "Windows" when it discusses this offering publicly. One would have to try hard not to do so. And Android today is far more popular than Windows, on far more devices, and used far more throughout the day. It's not something one can ignore. And yet Google, that platform's maker, did just that.

And it did just that despite the fact that one of the newly-announced products, the Pixel Slate, is Google's first Chrome OS tablet, a device that exists in part to run Android apps on a tablet form factor. And despite the fact that it announced two new flagship smartphones which run, wait for it, Android.

So why would Google do this?

Perhaps there is some parallel in history. Google, after all, is obsessed with a fear of turning into the next Microsoft. And Android's lack of success outside of smartphones does mirror Windows' lack of success outside of the desktop PC, at least on the client side. It is desperate for Android to avoid Windows' fate as a one-platform wonder.

On that note, Google is known to be plotting its way to a post-And...