Google 'mic drop' Gmail joke for April Fools' day backfires
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
source: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/715820699215138817
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-th...
Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.
The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately.
Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.
Edit: I have Google Fi
I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.
More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
They just got rid of one of the two available operators; quotes were there 10+ years ago.
Thanks buddy.
At least that's what I heard somewhere back then when they broke the + operator.
This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else.
When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts.
The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate.
Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.
And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure.
The TL;DR is: Maintenance is never free.
If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.
I can only speak about browser history sync, but it gets deleted after 6 weeks.
Someone broke something and it was producing mangled data. 6 weeks was the "cliff" for when mangled data stopped being visible.
Mangling data is an interesting thing you raise. Would reveal some issues with their professionalism. Albeit after the disaster we watched today on their April's 1st joke, I wouldn't be surprised if indeed that was the (sad) case as you mention.. :/
Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.
I'm paying for my google reader replacement now, and fairly happy about it.
Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.
No. They intentionally drove off the road for fun and somehow didn't understand humans enough to realize that it would be really infuriating to some of their ~1 billion users.
They did the same thing with their "Call your Dad today" calendar reminder and many other things. Google's product teams seem to be both deaf (help forums overflowing with "+1s" for simple fixes) and tone-deaf.
This whole thing makes me realize I should just switch to Microsoft's apps/ecosystem and retain my Gmail address. There's no reason to put up with Google's terrible product decisions anymore.
Why specifically mention Microsoft? Seems like you could have concluded you 'should' switch away from Google's ecosystem without coupling it to your desire to switch to Microsoft.
It's the one thing I hate about Android. The UIs of Google apps have gotten consistently worse over the years, mainly because they've been prioritizing aesthetics over functionality/ease of use.
I'm assuming their thought process is something along the lines of "This is obvious to me. Therefore, it will be obvious to the millions of Android users". No, it's obvious to you because you just thought of it, it's most definitely not obvious to everyone else.
> They're completely ignorant of any perspective that isn't their own.
It's like people commenting on Hacker News have never made a mistake or have something backfire at them.
Words can't even begin to describe how arrogant/stupid this was, and now users are paying the price.
This is totally expected when your employees are overwhelmingly in their 20s and have never held a job outside of a tech company in the valley.
My old company was full of developers like that. Fresh out of college, doesn't know how the real world works, yet is expected to develop products for the real world. It was horribly frustrating working with them.
Care to elaborate on this with a few examples? I have the opposite complaint. They seem to be focussing on ease of use precisely at the expense of functionality. I'd rather stuff was a little more complicated, because it would give me more control over stuff. Note that I don't want it complicated for the sake of complexity. But I've noticed a increase in "adding features makes stuff complicated" and joke memes about "just make it an option". Well, programming - proper programming - IS hard, but it's worth it because you get a better product.
On Android, I really don't have any problems.
/rant
(Related: WTF did they have to deprecate the old Photos and Picasa, which still have much superior options? They only "advantage" the new Photos has is the so-called AI, e.g. ability to auto-categorize your pictures of dogs.)
The corner cases issue may not be fixed. As harsh as it is to say---and as unacceptable, perhaps, as it should be to work this way---there is a train of thought that goes "Even if we get the occasional bad result, when we have a billion users and 99% of the results are good; ship it. That's 990 million happy customers." The 1% bad results have to be really bad to tip the scales.
Right, MS. Way better product decisions...
Do people perceive, perhaps, that there's a difference between "corporate Microsoft" and "AI research Microsoft," and the former would never make a mistake with their products like the latter has? I find that a less-than-likely assumption.
However, they're also pleasingly boring and know where their bread is buttered, so I sort of do trust them not to introduce April Fools Day jokes into their important business applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Easter_eggs_in_Microso...
The Mic drop feature was stupid, but it wasn't included for people who were Google Apps business, education or government users.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/5aOAnuG...
You know how in your group of friends there's one or two who are just super funny and make everyone laugh out loud? But then there's your other friend who every once in a while cracks a joke and you just kinda smile a bit? Yeah, that's who's putting together these pranks.
It's even been dubbed "Internet Jackass Day".
What if AT&T just played a fart sound in the middle of a call if you hit a button on your screen? Of course that would go wrong. How did they think this was any different? They're not just some startup anymore.
That's actually hilarious.
But otherwise, I got nothing.
And let me stop you before you reply "but what if it's terminal flatulence?" because you just answered your own question.
While you are collecting your thoughts, perhaps before you fully realise that your life has been changed forever, the silence is punctuated by a loud tphrrrphththpht.
Hilarious.
Thank you, AdBlock Plus & µBlock: you've changed my life for the better.
Gnome's Evolution was good too, IIRC. There are also Mutt and Pine, but they are terminal clients, so IDK how they handle inline images, tho mutt was OK with html.
HTML email is rendered with w3m which does a decent job.
Searching my local email with notmuch is blazing fast and works even better than Gmail's searching (IMO).
Certainly not everyone's cup of tea but if you like emacs otherwise, it's a great alternative to Gnus. Gnus is originally and primarily a newsreader and treating email like news works in some ways but fails in others. Also searching in Gnus is something I never really got to work well.
Like any open source project, the features are all there, but five minutes after installing it I was googling "Thunderbird slow redraw".
I'm not a fan of Thunderbird's aesthetics, but obviously that's subjective.
Functionally, a lot of my problems stem from the Enigmail plugin and Thunderbird search. It really wants encrypted mail to stay encrypted and that means search doesn't work. Last time I looked, there was some hacky workaround with configuring a filter to make a copy of incoming mail and decrypt the copy, but I couldn't get it to work reliably.
I ask because as Bruce Schneier pointed out, his email security's only as good as that of the people he messages. With so many people using gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc., striving for total privacy is expensive.
Thus, I politely wonder whether you've set unrealistic expectations.
For services we have running that send email but don't know how to encrypt (like Redmine and Jenkins), I wrote a little smtp proxy that all it does is look at the from and to addresses, select appropriate keys, construct a new encrypted email and forward it to the real smtp server. It's written in Python and is super-simple but has worked for years now.
A few companies (and their associated governments) have vast central databases containing most of the world's mail. At one point that would've been considered dystopian, but today many people just take it for granted.
I've previously worked in financial technology, and even financial advisors dealing with sensitive client info would always just use plain email.
--
If you're comfortable telling me: what country and industry are you in?
Is it the norm to require PGP use on the job, or is your employer an exception?
If the OP uses PGP for encryption, then his conversation partners use it too, and thus can't use gmail, outlook or yahoo (I am under the impression that desktop outlook has no support for PGP).
IMHO, that's a pretty important add on to keep current.
Mutt is pretty nice.
Because MH commands aren't part of a monolithic
mail system, you can use them at any time; you
don't have to start or quit the mail agent.
It's fine to mix other UNIX commands between
your MH commands, to leave your mail for a
while and do something else, and to work at
several terminals at the same time. Because
you use MH commands from a shell prompt, you
can use all the power of the shell.
1 - http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/overall/howwor.html#EmaT...
What tool are you using to synchronize with an MTA?
Also, OfflineIMAP[0] looks to be a solid IMAP solution, which may replace my use of fetchmail. However, a maintainer of OfflineIMAP indicates he is focused on imapfw[1]. So maybe that's one to look into as well. It's not that I'm unhappy with fetchmail, but it doesn't hurt to know what the relative strengths and weaknesses are of the choices available.
However on the free gmail side of things - not to be a jerk about this - but perhaps this should remind users that they are not the real customers for google...and that free platforms like this do in fact come with baggage. I'm not saying google intentionally meant to screw over their users (I totally get this was all meant in jest). But what incentive does google have other than saying "Oops, sorry". Any expectations for compensation i think are silly; and many users forget that. Does it suck that someone lost their job because of this? Hellz yeah, no doubt about that! But can we really expect google to do anything else except shut down this prank even if only after-the-fact? Again, it sucks, but this should serve to show/remind some of those users that these free platforms are not like your local electric/water utility, and should not be fully depended upon, certainly not for such important things as jobs, etc.
> Note that if you’re a Google Apps business, education or government user this feature was never turned on.
1. You press "SEND+drop mic" button (note how close the buttons are: http://imgur.com/5gBZVOh )
2. It says message sent and archived: http://imgur.com/GpOhiLY
3. Go to other recipient email, it contains attachment of mic drop image. http://imgur.com/Bs0iISe
4. Reply and it doesn't show up in inbox because conversation was archived (only accessible from "All Mail")
If you're part of a long message conversation
that isn't relevant, you can mute the conversation
to keep all future additions out of your inbox.
It doesn't seem like Google tested this on many real-world users before deploying...?
A UI that requires the user to read every button and look at every icon that they click on because it may have been changed to do something completely different is a terrible UI.
While I might notice a new color, I'm not certain that I would.
Furthermore, the icon doesn't have anything for you to read, since it uses an image (whose meaning may still not be clear to an older or disabled person; it kind of looks like an ice cream cone to me).
Then again, I don't watch TV so maybe I missed out on it being used.
In doing usability design even for astronauts or pilots I don't think you could fully trust a user to behave as you describe.
Fictional example #1: Hi everyone, We're having a baby!...Not (Then google appends "...Not" to the end.)
Fictional example #2: Hi everyone, Grandma passed away...Not
Fictional example #3: Hi everyone, We're moving away to city/state/country XYZ!...Not
Fictional example #4: Hi everyone, We're getting a divorce!...Not
Encrypted messaging or not, that's a lot of control to have (by a provider) over what users send out. Or maybe i'm thinking too pessimistically?
And they take a ton of work to organize.
In fact when the news is very distressing (spouse death) the person usually only notifies one or two very close people. Those people make sure the word gets out.
My grandmother had around 35 grandchildren and 10 greatgrandchildren when she passed. Notifying everyone wasn't hard. One child called a couple of their siblings those called a couple more siblings and/or their kids. Their kids told their kids. Then the inlaws called their sides of the family. Everyone was notified in a few hours. It wasn't even organized beforehand, these things happen in an ad hoc manner. No one person even had the contact information for even half of the others.
If anything, they have introduced unnecessary code to an already complex application that people actually use. More code means more bugs. They should take Microsofts 'no more easter eggs' approach and stop dicking around.
(Also, Microsoft took a 'no more easter eggs' approach? Wow, I didn't know. That's.... Well, if I want to go program somewhere with no personal freedom or trust from management, I know where I can go!).
This twists a bit the meaning of what I have said. This particular feature is made to be throw-away and is useless. Programmers should strive to make their code as simple as possible while keeping all of the _necessary_ features of the software. This feature was not necessary.
As for the Microsoft policy here is the source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/10/21/wh...
Personally I would hope that the programmers' personal freedom is not expressed in easter eggs in mission critical software
Also, what's the point of this prank when Gmail has a global audience? Only a minority of users will be aware that their tools might fail today because it's April Fools in the US.
Unfortunately the implementation was terrible, it confused users and lead people trying to seriously use the product to send silly pictures around.
Saying they don't care about the product because of this is silly. So many people use it because it is one of the best email applications around. A botched bit of fun doesn't mean the product is going to shit.
Apparently none of their "interviewed to death" workers noticed the potential ways this could backfire
While doesn't seem like their brightest idea I still miss the old whimsy Google.
> Apparently none of their "interviewed to death" workers noticed the potential ways this could backfire
This is IMO the really interesting part but I guess there is a strong groupthink culture there.
“Shut up Kris, you’re not being Googley.”
I am willing to bet at least one person on the team raised this as an issue before launch at it was ignored or shouted down.
That's what should have happened because the nature of an April Fools joke is that it bypasses the pre-testing, canarying, "go back to the drawing board", staged rollouts etc that most features would go through on their way to exposure to hundreds of millions of people. You can't do a 10% rollout on a joke that's meant to last one day.
I think Google should give up on April Fools jokes. Some of them have become so elaborate (like the Maps one last year) that it's obvious they have too many staff and not enough to do.
I was also responsible for a bunch of easter eggs, including TLing the [let it snow] one that ran just over the holidays in 2011. We did do staged 10% rollouts. It was usually an abbreviated staged rollout, where we would push to 10% for an hour or two, monitor Twitter for flames, check the logs to make sure all browsers were interacting with it (to catch browser bugs), and listen for an SRE yelling at us, but it was there.
Didn't work on GMail nor on any of the April Fools jokes, and I haven't been there for close to 2 years now, but that was my experience on Search & Doodles.
It also looks like they put the button where "Send" would normally go. Mistakes seem inevitable; this is pretty mind-boggling.
Note I am not disagreeing with you, just adding to the point that this was a super-bad idea.
This type of foolish pranks should backfire more strikingly. If they cannot treat their main (or at least one of the very important) business seriously, then they may face some very unpleasant things later.
So your point here is that safety-critical updates need to be rigorously tested? I agree with that, but I don't see any connection to whether it's okay to have pranks. I'm not confusing bugs and pranks, my entire point is that they're quite separate. Your bug risk is there with or without pranks. So if you feel like adding a prank, go ahead, just subject it to the same safety testing. That they released a UI update that annoys people does not imply anything about their ability to do safety testing.
> 2) and a serious business entity will not allow any such deliberate/damaging prank to slip through such a process.
I'll split "deliberate/damaging" into multiple cases.
Deliberate pranks: those are deliberate, they don't "slip through".
Safety-related damages: these are important, and not what happened here.
Non-safety-related damages: this getting through does not imply they have bad safey testing, so the comment about cars/robots going berserk is a non-sequitur.
Please define safety.
People lost their jobs due to this irresponsible prank. People might have missed replies from their doctors due to such foolishness. If now Google says that that's according to their "terms and conditions" then well, it clearly shows that Google is unreliable.
(Or do you make a distinction, but you would call it something different? Then just say that, and I'll use the term you want. My contention has nothing to do with word choice. Nobody wins an argument about word choice.)
I brought up the issue mainly for these reasons: a) safety issues in cars/robots are more obvious; b) if google can do this (such harmful pranks) with email, then they can do such (harmful) pranks with their other products too, including cars/robots. I wanted to bring out these issues on the discussion.
I see this over and over again. Users don't read things they assume are static. Users navigate by item placement, rather than color/text/size/shape. This is interface design 101.
On black Friday last year, I ordered a nice sheet set as a Christmas present for my SO, and the website was set up such that you could click through all the different colors and sizes for each sheet set and the same product page would simply update with Ajax to include new images/prices. So I found the sheets that I wanted and clicked "Add to Cart" -- the location of the button never changed, so I didn't really have to look at it in order to do this.
I found out only much later that the "Add to Cart" button updated on a few of the sheet sets to include a small "Will ship on <date two months in the future>" message above it, indicating that they were out of stock. The button itself remained unchanged, and in the same position.
The company was like "well, we warned you on the ordering page" I had to go back to the website to figure out what they were talking about. They ended up changing their policy of offering out of stock items for sale, in response to massive customer backlash.
If they actually wanted to notify users, they could have grayed out the "Add to Cart" button and created a new "Reserve for <Date>" or "Pre-Order, ships <Date>" button in a different location (probably below the "Add to Cart"). ALWAYS assume users won't notice your message, unless you force them to do something different than what they're used to.
They have to know that people occasionally use gmail for things that matter. Given the size of the user base, any kind of easter egg/joke/prank is going to create issues.
On one end of the spectrum, you have people who use gmail all the time who expect a button to be someplace and will just click it from peripheral vision. Some may not even notice that it's orange, others may subconsciously ignore the orange since these days UI changes all the time but nobody's going to put a prominent button at the bottom of an email form that's not "Send", right?
On the other end of the spectrum, you have folks who are not used to the internet at all, and only use a couple of sites (like gmail) after being instructed how to by friends or relatives. These folks know to click a "send" button. A "send" button with a little microphone drawing looks totally ok to click from this POV.
To put it another way, how am I supposed to get anything done when I'm spending all my time making sure the interface doesn't change beneath my feet?
From what I seen, the buttons didn't change, send has always been where it was, just another one was added.
It replaced the Send And Archive button that lives next to Send. (Adding a new one is still a bad idea, imho, but would have been borderline forgivable)
Nah, the bug is that it actually triggered on the normal send button as well, for some people.But second, people need to cut Google a little slack here. We all make mistakes, or errors in judgement, and Google is no different. Do we really want to live in a world where companies are afraid to innovate and try anything new, because people are going to jump on their backs if things don't work out? Part of the reason why Google was able to create so many great products, like Maps, Mail and so on, is because they've created an environment that's very conducive to creativity and experimentation.
As a consumer, I love the fact that Google has given me so many awesome productivity tools, with great features, completely for free, and I don't want them to ever lose the creative/experimental culture that made it possible. If you're not a fan of such a culture, if you just want a no-nonsense humorless stable suit-driven product, well, Microsoft has you well covered.
And make no mistake, this has hurt people, seriously.
Unless Google actually seeks those out and rights the wrong they did them, there is no sympathy or forgiveness they deserve in any way whatsoever.
It's quite likely that this was just directly shipped given that it's a one-day thing.
Nobody's asking them to stop innovating; you can be more rigorous in your shipping process (which they usually are) without affecting innovation.
Don't forget always-on surveillance of its users ;)
Why did it reach shipping before they realised it is the real question.
This is a terrible idea before it even leaves the whiteboard.
You have to refresh the page. And apparently even that may not be enough. I Ctrl-R refreshed in Firefox and still saw the button (aggressive caching?). I closed the tab and loaded gmail in a new tab, and finally button went away.
How many of the people claiming to have clicked a button few minutes / hours after it was out and having spectacular irreversible consequences to their lives is just a phony?
I would say between 40% and 90%, but don't know better than that.
Soo... they again purposely broke the whole idea behind email?
We need an April Fools day postmortem.
That said over the years we had a few people asking about this feature as a serious option...
http://time.com/4278950/april-fools-gmail-mic-drop/
http://fortune.com/2016/04/01/google-mic-drop/
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/1/11344044/google-gmail-mic-d...
Now, they could be in on the joke and/or all just picking up the original story and parroting it without any fact checking. I'm still hoping the real prank here was getting the media to cover a fake prank, but I'm becoming less sure of my instincts.
I definitely got a layover notice telling me about it last night around 8PM CST.
>to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry. The feature has been turned off.
I did enjoy the it's a feature/bug dual language though.
There is a fix available for this issue:
Romanian government used that tactic for some years on all old cable phones, until google brought that feature to the masses with the new smartphone and laptop technology.
I think it was a great, if risky, marketing move — people all over the internet are talking about Gmail today.
Sure, some may have had a bit of trouble, but the Gmail team apologized publicly, thus providing a finger-pointing target for stressed office workers.
Today I received an email from someone asking why I was not replying to the other email thread started on April 1st. The person had clicked the 'drop the mic' button, and was not seeing any further replies to that thread. Not good!
It told you about the feature in a pop up ( I think) when you went to compose a new email and the button was there next to the send button when composing.
Seems obvious this was a bad idea.
Edit: Google's animated gif showing the whole UI: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GYnAKaZY9v4/Vv2RkU5hIcI/AAAAAAAAB...
I would guess they missed the idea that people use muscle memory to close irritating pop-ups without trying to figure out why it's there, or what it relates to. They are then left with 2 send buttons, one with a now ambiguous microphone icon.
That's, of course, not what's going to happen.
They might have reacted differently to an actual dialog at first click that says "This will inject an image into your outbound email, and mute the conversation. Continue?" (with the default choice set to "NO".
April Fools day never claimed not to be devious.
Would be crazy if it was another level deep of April Fools.
It wasn't a bug it was a feature. Maybe I'm too much of an engineer but I HATE when PM's/managers/PR representatives just classify all unexpected and undesired behaviour as "bugs". A "bug" implies I made a mistake. I didn't make a mistake. I developed EXACTLY what you told me, after numerous rounds of confirmation and feedback loops. It's not a bug if it's doing exactly what it was supposed to.
I guess this kind of thing is why we no longer have flight simulators in our spreadsheets and so forth.
But when you start messing with the user's content as a joke, god help you.
Hopefully!
We all felt very stupid and unprofessional.
When the list of "bugs" are used in performance metrics which affect your career, correctly assigning blame becomes important.
EDIT Wording, pre-coffee.
When there's a problem with requirements and the users are screaming, and the system isn't doing what they want (but exactly what they built), the PM comes to me and says "We fucked up. You need to drop everything and fix this right away."
This has been the case with almost every PM I've ever worked with.
Not hard to see why something like this would create unintended consequences of an important nature: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715752594551869440
This doesn't upset me. This doesn't upset you. This doesn't upset hundreds of thousands of people and as unfunny as this is, I'm sure many are laughing about it.
However, it can upset some people. Some people who would mistakenly click the button because, god forbid, they forgot not to use the internet at all on April 1st, and that mistake would appear in an extremely important conversation.
And that mistake would appear during career discussions. And that mistake would get someone not hired, or fired, or whatever.
You guys want to complain, talk about how they should "look harder", how they should "take responsibility" and "own up to their mistakes", how they should "be happy not to work somewhere people are so uptight"? Have some fucking empathy.
I'd wager the majority of HN is well off, or well off enough that they don't have to worry about the rent or their water bill. But I'd like to see some of the people here struggling to make ends meet. Maybe you won't be so sociopathic about the potential for serious harm.
This thread makes me sick.
I understand where you're coming from, and I understand how someone may have clicked it by accident. I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this, and a follow-up email explaining it was a mistake, and let that affect them.
And no, there's no classism at play. It's purely and simply a lack of empathy. A lack of understanding of what it's like to be in a situation where losing your job may cost you your home, your children or even your life.
> I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this
Then don't empathize with the recipient. Plenty of bosses are jerks. But empathize with the sender, who would lose a job they cared about and can't necessarily get a new one like they grow on trees.
Shouldn't you also ask for empathy in people who are upset by it? They seem to have the least empathy of everybody, if they are going to fire somebody over animated GIF.
I haven't seen any of those people here on HN. Not today, at least. So I can't actually tell them. Show me someone and I'll be glad to have a chat...
Unfortunately, people like that probably won't come to HN and leave comment - cool, I just fired someone over it! But they absolutely should get the blame.
It's like people who explain away their assholish behaviour by saying "it was just a joke, lighten up".
How would you know you sent one, or got pranked, if you used the normal send button? I'd be pissed in that scenario if it was work related. Bosses famously often lack senses of humour.
Which now has a Minion GIF in it.
It is one thing for a prank to do something to the UI of a product, like invert the colors or display Comic Sans. It is quite another when it alters the content of the very messages you are passing.
I think email is /primarily/ used as a professional communication tool today. Casual and personal uses of email have been largely replaced by social media.
It's a free product...you got what you paid for!
If it is free, you are not the customer, you are the product for their real customers.
I don't know if they also received this feature.
Their real everyday users amount in the millions. But please give us more insight using highly inappropriate analogies.
You'll notice Google has almost no comprehension of real people's lives. Google designers have never had to do work on a 1024x768 screen at the office.
Googlers live in a bubble where technology is perfect, which is why they seem to believe technology can solve a lot of human issues much easier than they actually can. For them, it's possible.
But the AI won't really understand why people watch a sunset.
The UX researchers here at Google DO in fact sit down with many people and watch them use all sorts of parts of google, gmail, etc. In fact they go out of their way to run usability studies in various parts of the countries, because, you know, selection bias.
Also automated data is collected.
The real problem here is, if you have X million users, can you really know them as a unified set of people? Of course not.
Sure this prank backfired, but hey, have some compassion for the people who worked on it. They were trying to be funny, and trying to bring a little light to people's life. There was no intention of ruining anyone's day.
If Google went to a senior citizens' home, and watched how some of their less technically inclined users used their products, I'm confident Google would fire everyone with the word "designer" in their title and start over.
But this is largely immaterial to this particular joke. The joke was funny. The choice to implement it for real was not.
I dunno, you sure are quick to judge a very difficult subject area.
Ever since Google hired their "VP of Design", their products have heavily shifted away from being functionally useful.
There's a reason Gmail is the last bastion of competent design at Google. There's a reason that even Googlers said they wouldn't use Gmail if Inbox became the "new Gmail", and this is probably where this conversation rounds back to this prank:
You don't %$@# with email.
Because if that is "functionally useful" then I will happily continue using trendy. The thing with design is that it is not a simple subject area. You are constantly balancing several (somtimes mutually exclusive) objectives.
At the end of the day, blame end-users. They use the products that are "trendy" and look nice. They dictate good design.
You want bad design, try most of the AWS tools. You can have both functionality and appeal. Pretending they are mutually exclusive is silly.
Are they allowed to rearrange the buttons then? Or should they never change the UI in fear that users might bump the wrong button due to muscle memory.
The article posted to a UK site with a byline that says "Posted 43 minutes ago". At the time of writing this comment; 43 minutes was ~2pm in the UK, give or take a few minutes.
The article also has an update on 11:50. That update either came ~2 hours before the article was posted, or 8-9 hours in the future.
So, I'm going to guess the whole article is fake.
Honestly this is the best April Fools I've seen on the internet in years because I've no idea whether the mic drop feature existed or not. The uncertainty in whether it's real owns
"Look, this button is right here and I thought it was send." Now a non-technical boss will just assume that person is lying because no button is in gmail anymore. Thanks Google. Stay Classy.
In the US I believe normal mail cannot be substantially modified in transit, and that this is a Federal offense. For instance for a postal worker to open letters and insert cartoons because it was April Fool's day he would not only lose his job but also be subject to prosecution.
Certainly an email server is in some way exempt as it is possible for software to add headers to an email, but if the server modifies the message and the manner of communication substantially, there might be serious legal ramifications to this practical joke of Google. Especially since this joke impeded the response in a way similar to scratching out the return address of a postal letter.
The very fact that Google thought it worthwhile to do such a thing with personal communication absolutely boggles the mind. Any responsible organization would be insane put their email on their servers after such a stunt.
The thing is though, if email was treated in a way similar to Federal mail, the whole debate about encryption and due process could be handled by laws that already protect privacy. For some strange reason, because it uses a computer, we lose many fundmental rights that we already had with Federal mail. In a certain way email is a service so fundamental to society now, that it becomes a necessary utility - so many things can't be done without an email address today.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/01/gmails-mic-...
Not a lawyer, but I wonder if Google is on very thin ice here. Federal law about snail mail may not be relevant if someone launches a substantial civil damages suit.
>The very fact that Google thought it worthwhile to do such a thing with personal communication absolutely boggles the mind.
This might have been funny on G's own internal network, kind of. But forcing it on users was astoundingly stupid and tone deaf.
Maybe next year we can have a gif of Eric Schmidt jumping over a shark on water skis.
April Fools is such a collective waste of time. Not only does it lower productivity of many people for a day, some "pranks" actually take days to prepare. I imagine that producing SnoopaVision for Youtube [1] wasn't exactly cheap.
The modern world is pathetic.
Getting back on topic, given historical data, it's foolish to not expect something to happen/change on April 1st, especially on google products.
So yes, I place the blame on the users.