Monday, March 21, 2011

A Rant against Google

The attitude of Google around Gmail/Blogspot etc. is just unconsciable. You mayind some weird contractions in ths post (in fact there is one on the previous line it should say "may find", not "mayind").

Google has an autosave feature on gmail and blogspot. How can this be bad you ask? The answer is that
  1. I can't disable it (you will take it our way and there are no exceptions - Shades of Apple anyone?)
  2. When autosave kicks in (in this case on IE9) it suspends the recognition of keyboard events. So whatever I was typing while autosave was taking place gets lost. Hence there will be letters, punctuation and white space missing from posts and mails.
  3. I can't change the timing - it happens every 30 seconds whether I want it to or not.
The Google position (from forum, etc.) is

"It is a feature. But if it is causing problems, then the feature has bugs. You fix it by removing the bugs, not by removing the feature.
The fact that the draft is causing an error means that there is a bug someplace. (It might be a browser or add-in problem rather than a google problem, but there is still a bug.) If you want to work on getting rid of the bug, follow my instructions above.
Saying "any feature that has a potential for disruption should be fully user-configurable" is not at all helpful. If you talk to a software designer, they would tell you that there goes the path to madness. EVERY feature "has a potential for disruption", but every time you add a configuration option you make your software more complicated and MORE prone to breakage. The solution is to make features work correctly, not to add hundreds and hundreds of configuration options."

This is directly copied from "Joshua's reply" I don't know who Joshua is, nor what responsibility he has. But judging from the amount of angst there has been around this, and the crass insensitivity of his answer above, I hope he doesn't jave product direction nor customer facing responsibilities for long.
Oh and one of the (many) links (primary sources) for this rant is at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=17677aa4545a3eca&hl=en

I understand Apple's walled garden (orchard?), but Google's not at all.

1 comment:

  1. Chris, you and other people on that thread are assuming that Joshua is a Google employee, but he doesn't have a profile, and from my experience on their help forums , a lot of people contribute 'help' who are not actually employees of Google at all. It's not clear to me how one identifies authentic employees. The current set-up certainly is not designed to engender trust in Google services.

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