There are obviously a lot of unhappy users with legitimate gripes. But Google would probably be looking at the growth of Gmail to validate what ever the design department is doing. That growth is pretty impressive.
What really surprised me is how few of my friends get the 'conversation' view even in 2012. After too many awkward conversations and now their 'we've got absolutely no design skills and can't design for shit' redesign, I'm just shrugging when people say their hotmail account has been hacked for the 15th time.
So just out of curiosity - what services would you recommend to an inquiring mind?
I've opened multiple tickets, and all they can say is "sorry" and "we know about it" and "we're working on it", but actual fixes still haven't come. Having a solid chat experience obviously is not high on their priority list.
1) Deficient search, the more email you keep, the more you rely on search to find something from few days to few years ago. Incredibly painful with Fastmail.
2) Lack of calendar. It's just so more convenient to have your calendar integrated with email.
3) Lack of Exchange ActiveSync support (as in protocol). This protocol allows to sync email, calendar and contacts from the same account. All these things I want to be synced to my phone. Keeping contacts and calendar in Gmail (because it has ActiveSync support) and email in Fastmail was becoming more and more frustrating.
If past performance is your primary way of to 'validate' anything, you obviously have a very poor understanding of the subject matter and are going to lag behind those who do.
andrewfelix was prompting you to elaborate. Just replying "that's not what I said" is completely unproductive - this is meant to be a conversation, not a game of twenty questions. We shouldn't have to guess at your meaning.
Of course past performance of a product is a factor worth considering in determining the future success of someone in any field. However if you really want to excel at this field, past performance is not likely to be the _primary_ factor (though it could be a smaller factor) in how you 'validate' future worth.
For instance, I can easily measure the past performance of stocks on the stock exchange. However if I really want to succeed in trading shares, 'have the stocks of foobar gone up in the past' is not likely to be the primary way I validate whether foobar is worth investing in.
Hope that helps you :) I didn't mean to sound as indignant as perhaps I did.
... incidentally, I still find it strangely novel when disagreements on HN don't turn into Internet Arguments. Makes such a refreshing change from, well, the rest of the web. :)