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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna quote @kevingadd from down below because I can't say it better myself: "The new gmail is streamlined for particular purposes and not for others. You'd think that one of the biggest data companies in the universe would be able to gather actual data about how people use their software and ensure they aren't making it significantly worse to use for subsets of the customer base. Maybe this is what Google actually did, and they decided they don't care about the 1-10% of their users who use gmail for anything other than sending glorified SMS messages to people."

The new gmail is a toy for kids.

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Glorified SMS? I get that the compose window is smaller but this is pretty unbelievably hyperbole. On my main screen, I get over 4000 characters before having to scroll and even on my 13" laptop screen, I can fit close to 1700 characters in the compose window before I get a scroll bar (http://cl.ly/image/0H1A2O3u251U). In contrast, the "old" version only gives me about 650 characters on my small screen (http://cl.ly/image/0h3O2H3g0P21). Perhaps I'm missing something but this seems to free up real estate.

It's glorified SMS in that the designer of the feature has explicitly said that they changed the design so that it would basically be glorified chat:

> What it looks like, really, is a slightly oversized version of Gchat. And that’s no accident. Google’s actively trying to make email less fussy and formal--or, in other words, to make it a little more like instant messaging. And as Jason Cornwell, Gmail’s lead designer, explains, one of the ways to do that is simply to "give you permission to write shorter messages." [...]

> "It was a space that was sort of intimidating, I think, to write a message like 'Hey, wanna get lunch?'" he explains. "We wanted the new compose to facilitate these quicker messages. Or at least make it a space where that felt appropriate."

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672250/how-a-tiny-new-compose-w...

"hey, let's meet for coffee soooooooon! your shout? :-)"

Dear Google, please don't feel you need to give me permission to write the above. And definitely don't remove or change handy features to achieve such an objective. It's my business how I compose email, and my responsibility for justifying the occasions where a formal style is needed vs casual. Just make the interface useful and stop trying to turn email into something it's not.

Guess I'm a kid, then? I find it faster to write an email on it than I did before and I like the ability to compose with another email in the background.

GMail has some bits I don't like, but by and large I'm a pretty big fan.

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