Google makes its money out of advertising, and it announced earlier today that the next iteration of Android would be called “KitKat”. It doesn’t take much to conclude that money changed hands to switch away from Key Lime Pie, but this apparently isn’t so.
The BBC reports that it was told by Google’s John Lagerling, director of Android global partnerships that “This is not a money-changing-hands kind of deal” and instead the idea was to do something “fun and unexpected”.
It also apparently came about because “We realised that very few people actually know the taste of a key lime pie. One of the snacks that we keep in our kitchen for late-night coding are KitKats. And someone said: ‘Hey, why don’t we call the release KitKat?’ We didn’t even know which company controlled the name, and we thought that [the choice] would be difficult. But then we thought well why not, and we decided to reach out to the Nestle folks.”
Apparently, it took Nestle less than an hour to agree to do it. With over a billion Android activations to date, it’s not hard to see why the food giant jumped at the chance. It will apparently also produce more than 50 million Android-branded chocolate bars to commemorate the deal.
[BBC]