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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

I am always wondering to what extent logo and company name matter. Google has rather boring logo yet they are successful. I guess that many people who heard for the first time about mobile apps framework Xamarin thought "hmm, this must be some medicine for diarrhea" but still this tool got pretty popular.

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Logo and Branding are highly dependent on the success of the company than the other way around. Nike's logo is iconic because of the success of the company, it's not intrinsic to the shape itself. This is something I have to remind all my clients who send me a brief that essentially boils down to "Make me a billon-dollar logo."¹

I then have to remind them that the only way to do that is to actually build a company worth a billion dollars in revenue, then open Photoshop and draw a random squiggle.

¹Most common one is, "I need the logo to be world-class, like Apple or Microsoft."

Company success and logo "success" are not necessarily fully related. A bad company can have a good logo, and a good company can have a bad logo. A good logo just gives your org an edge. For Google it doesn't matter anymore because they are already a top dog and everybody recognizes their logo.

I suppose they could simplify it, such as putting a lower-case "g" inside a colored circle (not an outlined circle). It's close enough to the existing logo that the change would only trigger a brand recognition problem for a short period.

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