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Despite all his skills and dominance in artificial intelligence, Google is surprisingly lacking in nature.
In movement after the fact, Google steals the defeat of the victory. And all because the company culture is blind to the value of passionate users.
I'm sure Google is monitoring user numbers and applying analytics to everything it can measure. A radically analytic approach is powerful, but it can make you forget the factors that can not be measured. Factors such as the passion of the user.
My favorite example is Google+. After a first rush of use in the first two years, the social network has gradually been smothered – stifled by a reputation for low engagement.
This reputation was largely false. But over time, Google has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as Google has taken repeated steps to hide and remove the engagement.
He killed Circle sharing, the best way to discover high quality active users. He added communities, which reduced the focus on users. His idiotic algorithms signaled (and thereby obscured the view of the public) high quality comments, while simultaneously failing to report obvious spam. (Finally, Google's algorithms have improved a lot, but only after most users have already abandoned the platform.)
This is a great plan – if your goal is to minimize the user's commitment.
Google+ was and still is the online playground for Google's most loyal fans. Google could have brought a billion people to this playground where Google fans could convince everyone to share their enthusiasm for Android, Pixel phones, Pixelbooks, Google Search, Google Assistant, Google Home, Gmail, YouTube and all. rest.
Instead, he actively buried or removed the user's engagement until Google+ became a shell of his old identity. It has deprived its most passionate users of the public, demonstrating that it does not understand the value of these users.
And now, it's doing something similar to email.
Google gives and Google goes away
Google announced this week the end of two products related to email.
The first is an experimental alternative to Gmail called Inbox. The other is a Chrome app for offline Gmail.
The Gmail Offline Chrome app, launched seven years ago by Google and has not been updated for five years, will be removed from the Chrome Web Store on December 3rd. It has been superseded by the web version of Gmail, which supports superior offline capability for years. (You can enable the offline feature by accessing the Gmail settings, choosing the Offline tab and making sure that the "Enable Offline Mail" check box is selected).
But no one cares about the Gmail Offline Chrome app. Good riddance to that. Technically, it did not even come out of the beta.
The termination of Google Inbox, on the other hand, is more problematic. The inbox will be killed in March, according to a Google blog this week.
Inbox, which is officially and strangely under the Inbox by Gmail brand, was launched as an experimental app in 2014. And probably in a state of panic.
In 2013, Gmail was proudly text-based and largely devoid of meaningful interface design. The service was popular and growing, and it seemed that Google would govern email indefinitely.
Then the disaster struck.
In early 2013, a startup announced an iPhone application called Mailbox. More than a million people have signed up to try it before even launching it, because of the innovation and appeal of its user interface.
The key innovation of the mailbox – current now, but revealing at the time – was the use of sweeping left or right to move or repeat messages. Mailbox has also put forward other elements of interface, including the containment of items in boxes or "cards". The combination of Mailbox features has facilitated the realization of a "zero mailbox".
It's possible that Mailbox's interface, and its obvious appeal, shocked Google to rethink its hyper-minimalist design and influenced the course of its design language, Material Design, introduced by the company during the summer 2014.
Google announced Inbox – one of the first Material Design products – a few months later.
Google may have rushed the inbox into the marketplace to avoid losing users on map-centric launches, such as Mailbox and its subsequent imitators.
Alas, poor Mailbox has never been lucky. Its fatal flaw was that it was not an email service, but rather an interface to messaging services owned by other companies.
The companies that controlled the messaging services, including Google, easily copied the most attractive user interface elements of Mailbox, making them ubiquitous and Mailbox, therefore, worthless.
Dropbox, having acquired Mailbox a month after its launch, killed it in December 2015.
Gmail itself has gradually been revamped, as well as many (but not all) popular features of the inbox, such as smart answers.
Gmail still does not have built-in Inbox Reminder integration, Mobile Inbox for messaging, message grouping, inbox access, and what fans call an interface "cleaner" user.
Importantly, the general atmosphere of the Inbox and Gmail – and the muscle memory required to use them – are still very different.
Why kill Inbox is an error
Google probably has about 1.3 billion e-mail users.
Most of them only use Gmail. A significant minority only use the inbox. And a lot of people – including yours really – are in between.
This change is facilitated by a number of factors. One of them is that filters created in Gmail settings work in the inbox.
Many users prefer to use Gmail in their desktop browser because they appreciate the granular control of everything, but they prefer the Inbox on mobile for the ease of use of type mailbox.
Google's thinking seems to be that:
- A messaging system is better than two.
- More people are using Gmail than the inbox.
- Gmail is now pretty close to the inbox in the interface and features,
And, therefore, it's time to kill Inbox.
The problem with this thinking is that all users are treated equally here. If Google were able to measure the passion of users, it would almost be certain that passionate users use the inbox very much.
Which does not mean that Google's passionate users do not use Gmail. They do. Some savvy users love Gmail because it allows better control of the user.
Still, many users stick to Gmail because they do not really care much. They are used to it and do not want to change anything.
Inbox users are the users looking for the latest, users who can adapt more quickly to a new way of doing things, users who access all the innovations recently launched by Google.
The most cynical summary of this story is that Google had Gmail and everyone was happy. Then Google has created a more innovative alternative and its best users, the most active and committed, have liked this alternative. Then she killed that alternative after her most loyal fans spent countless precious hours mastering it.
This is a great plan – so your goal is to minimize the trust and loyalty of your most passionate users.
And that's why killing Inbox is a mistake. This is another slap in the face of the passionate minority.
What Google does not understand is that not all users are the same. Passionate users are much more valuable to Google than indifferent users. They try new things. They buy stuff. They persuade the public in favor of Google.
By handling Google+ badly, killing the player and now killing the inbox, Google has made passionate users less passionate.
If this continues, its most passionate users will take their passion elsewhere.
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