KitKat for Google? Give us a break

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The name of the new version of Google’s Android operating system has been announced. What an odd sentence that is. How sophisticated our civilisation has become! When one of our ancestors first paused for a moment to select a particularly sharp bit of rock with which to attempt to skin a mammoth, little did he, or she (that’s saved me a letter), know where we’d all end up.

One day you’re just restricting the roaming options of some goats using a bit of creeper, or working out which little bits of grit to stick in the ground for there to be cabbages in a few months’ time, and then, within a cosmic twinkling of an eye, some people are earning their food and shelter by announcing the new name of the slightly altered version of a totally intangible thing.

They don’t actually make the totally intangible thing. They don’t even alter the totally intangible thing themselves. Neither do they themselves think of the new name for this updated abstract noun. They just announce that new name. That’s where it was heading, Ancestor Ug, when you first got a fire to light. You started a chain reaction which led inexorably to PR.

I’m not really a luddite. I haven’t got the commitment or the physical strength to smash anything. I’m just a whinger really so I know that we sort of do need operating systems. They may be intangible but they’re not purposeless. They’re much closer kin to a hand-axe than they are to a mission statement.

Boring farce

Or a poem, for that matter. But I’m fairly sure that they don’t really need names and, if you give them names, it doesn’t really matter what those names are as long as they’re different from one another as long as you don’t give two different versions of an operating system the same name. I think I just had an idea for the most boring farce ever written.

What I still haven’t done, I realise, is told you the name of the new version of Google’s Android operating system. I’m slightly tempted not to. After all, if you’re properly interested in that sort of thing then a) you probably already know its name and b) there’s something wrong with you.

But I will. It’s called KitKat. That’s not a coincidence. It’s deliberately named after the chocolate bar. Apparently Nestle is fine with that. It’s not sponsorship it hasn’t paid for the name of its product to be written on this thing you can’t write on but the company has allowed it. “This is not a money-changing-hands kind of deal,” said John Lagerling, director of Android global partnerships.

That’s quite unusual. When A’s label is sported by B, one of A or B is almost always charging to offset the reputational cost. The Premier League must reckon that the money Barclays pays adequately compensates it for being publicly associated with a discredited bank. Conversely, clothes designers wouldn’t consent to their names being plastered all over so many of the world’s most vain and stupid people unless they’d been lavishly remunerated first.

Love match

But for Google and Nestle, there’s no dowry. This genuinely seems to be a love match. Admittedly, Google’s options were limited: every version of the operating system has been named after some sort of cake or sugary snack (unbranded ones up to now). The company has been moving through the alphabet, starting at cupcake and had got as far as jelly bean. So it needed an edible treat beginning with K and went off its first idea: “We realised that very few people actually know the taste of a key lime pie,” lamented Lagerling.

So KitKat really hit the spot. I’m familiar with the feeling. Sometimes I wonder how dastardly a third world scam Nestle would need to pull to make me consider buying a Biscuit Boost. Still, Google’s decision is surprising. It aspires to be squeaky-clean.

As aspirations go, it’s not been looking particularly realistic of late as the corporation’s tax avoidance has become more evident, but it’s still a company that tries to generate a wholesome, quirky, Californian vibe. That’s why it called an operating system Cupcake.

That’s why its offices are full of free snacks for employees. There’s still a faint echo of “Don’t Be Evil” in the think spaces and mood rooms, albeit with an irritating interrogative inflection.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd