Sponsoring Go introduction workshops for university undergrads, complete with Google-swag prizes and actual Google employees flown in from another country.

So, quite a lot if that experience is anything to go by.

I will say that my professor Axel Schreiner at RIT offered one of the two first Golang classes at a collegiate level back in... 2009? and he reached out to Google and said, "send us some Android phones so that we can develop Go on ARM"

They obliged with a full crate of first generation Motorola phones, each one preloaded with a 30 day free Verizon plan. Every person who took that class got one, and surely all of them made it back into the school's hands at the end of the quarter.

(I'm not sure how many people actually ever compiled and executed any go binaries on arm that year; we all learned Go, and it was a great class! But as far as the class, the phones were completely unnecessary. I think that they did make a more relevant class where the phones were able to be used again the year after that.)

Its branding and companies using the language with hopes of being acquired by them is already good enough.

Had Go been released at AT&T and it would have shared the same fate as Limbo.

> companies using the language with hopes of being acquired by them

This is beyond belief. What companies are using Go with the hopes of being acquired by Google? Does anyone honestly believe that Google's acquisitions teams know or care about programming languages? Any business that acquires companies on that basis is doomed to failure, as is any company that hopes to be acquired on that basis.

Well if one doesn't like something, they have to come up with part hilarious and part wild assertions like this.

as what ?

The idea here is if it worked its marketing but if it doesn't its market that has spoken.

Making it the first Google result for "go"? (Instead of the verb, or the game)

When I search "go" on google the first result I get is a package courier, then the game, then the verb... then comes Golang though.