Google has retired the Bard name and rolled everything under Gemini this week, complete with a new app and a paid Gemini Advanced tier sitting on their largest model. The product news is fine and roughly what everyone expected. The interesting thing is watching my timeline argue about the name harder than the capability.
Half of it is "finally, one brand instead of three". The other half is mourning Bard, or rather mourning the fact that they'd just started telling colleagues to use Bard and now have to un-teach that. Both reactions are really about the same thing: the ground keeps moving, and every rename is a small tax on everyone who built a habit, a bookmark, or a sentence in some onboarding doc around the old word.
I've no strong feeling about the model itself yet; I'll judge it when I've actually leaned on it for a week. What I do feel is the familiar weariness of a tool I use being renamed for reasons that have nothing to do with me. I still have shell aliases pointing at services that were rebranded years ago. The product moves on. The muscle memory does not. So I'll learn to say Gemini, and quietly resent having to, and in eighteen months I'll do it again.