AI branding

You can probably tell by my blog posts that I prefer OpenAI to Anthropic — more open, more affordable, less doomer — but I’ve gotta hand it to Anthropic for their focus. Doing fewer things, like just Claude Code and the new Claude Design, makes the products more approachable and easier to market. And last year, when OpenAI was doing too much, Anthropic was all-in on coding.

On the other hand, Claude’s product lineup isn’t named very creatively. Code, Design, and Cowork feel generic next to names like Codex, Pulse, and Atlas. The core design and personality of Claude helps make up for that. Claude is a friendly, less awkward name than ChatGPT.

There has been reporting of OpenAI consolidating all their user features into an “everything” super app. But what if that’s not ChatGPT, but actually Codex? The tricky part is they already have 900k weekly users using ChatGPT. If they do more with the Codex brand, it’s going to be a years-long transition.

Apparently the kids just call ChatGPT “Chat” anyway, though.

With Micro.blog, I like our approach where the Mac app has the core blogging features but also integrates private notes, book reading progress, and movie blogging. On mobile, those features are split into separate apps: Strata and Epilogue. It keeps each app focused, but it does make discovery more difficult for users. I’m working on a new branding web page to help with that.

Manton Reece @manton