Google and their ilk picking these childish cutesy names ("Project Loon", "Project Fi", "Malta") is incredibly grating and needlessly detracts from their objectives. Do it once and maybe it's clever. Do it as a rule, and it's hard to take the work seriously. Not to mention, do any of these so-called "projects" outside of Google's core competencies do well once they meet with the real world?
Indeed, the tech world seems to be full of people totally oblivious to branding - anything that's short and snappy and sounds vaguely familiar is 'great', no matter the real world or rest of the world.
Actually Google seems to be one of the worst at choosing googlable names ('Alphabet').
I agree. Why do they have to pick a whole name of a country at the beginning?
As if "America Inc" or "Canada Inc" would be able to operate