99 percent invisible has a podcast discussing this issue with a designer who takes the opposite position. A main point is that a simple, reproducible logo is ideal.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-de...

> harder it should have been to produce

I guarantee you, it was extremely hard to produce. $10k for three initial designs, $150k for dozens of meetings gaining approval from twelve tiers of managers, $50k to consolidate and synthesize hours of feedback from everyone and their nephew, $10k to fly out and present to the CEO, another $200k over again to scrap it all and re-do it from scratch, and then $80k to figure out how to get something that will not be vetoed by the 2,000 people who have involved themselves in the process.

A green rectangle is pretty much the only thing that can survive that meatgrinder.

> I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.

How is that an excessive one-time marketing expense for a company with an annual revenue of $50 billion? That's 0.001% of revenue and is just a drop in the overall marketing budget. Engineers are quick to dismiss marketing and sales, but the reality is they are critical to any business. As much as we would like, technically superior products do not just sell themselves. It is especially funny because advertising is the bread and butter of two of the largest tech companies, Facebook and Google. As another poster said, this is creating a brand, not just a logo.

Far more went into producing that logo than just using the rectangle tool in Photoshop.