Fair enough, there are 2 screenshots, one of GMail in message view, and one of a nested Google Analytics menu. But in the case of Google Analytics, the author spends most of the words complaining about a bugged/glitchy upgrade rollout. Which of course is worth complaining about, but shouldn't be
the main example in a screed about company-wide failure – has there ever been, in the history of tech, a product upgrade+redesign that
didn't glitch and anger long-time users?
But more to the point, GA is a specialized product for an audience of (relatively speaking) power users. What is the other analytics product that purports to deliver a comparable variety of metrics, in a more useful way? That's not a rhetorical question – I honestly want to know, and expected an article with this headline to have specific and tangible comparisons.
In the case of GMail – I honestly couldn't find how to get the specific view that the author sees. I'm still using the same GMail account that I opened in its launch month, which over the years I've tweaked to my liking – such as setting "Button labels" to "Text". So I checked a relatively new alt-Gmail account, and also my main Hotmail/Live account, and was surprised to see how similar the two interfaces are.
So what is the author's point of reference when he claims "Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch". I'm looking at my Hey account right now, and sure, it's different from my GMail interface, but I also use it 0.001% as much as I do GMail, and for a much smaller subset of communications. I sure as hell wouldn't tell people Hey is so much better than GMail and expect it to be self-evident to people, not without providing visual comparisons.