Google to start forcing new Gmail interface this month

A product manager's promotion.

> I understand that companies need to innovate to keep their edge

This is fine if a user can opt out of the “innovation”. Fortunately things like old.reddit.com and https://mail.google.com/mail/u/ exist. The major downside is both of those truly are frozen in time and don’t get features that I do want backported (reactive layout, for example).

We’re in a weird period of time for computing where you can’t go back in time and relive an experience. I can boot up a Windows 98 machine with a Sidewinder game pad and play pinball like I did 25 years ago. I can’t (ever again?) view my iOS lock screen with the same font that was used just 4 months ago. FOSS + desktop applications may be the only ecosystems that allow the clock to be rolled back.

It feels like this is a mindset across the industry. Everything seems to moving away from customization-- no "I prefer the old UI", no "I want these accessibility/shortcut tools", no "this theming (more complex than the occasional dark-mode toggle) helps with my workflow", no "let me see real error messages instead of oopsie-daisy cop-outs".

The overall narrative is infantilization of the customer. It's not like our customers are doing something important with our products, or have specific needs or tastes. They're just undifferentiated blobs that can be slid through whatever KPI-tracking funnel we want them to run through this week.

I wonder if this is just the natural evolution of the hyperscale business-- when "everyone" is your potential audience, the median/mean customer becomes a nontechnical user with no expectations, and so you end up with business decisions that wouldn't fly at a more focused "tools for professionals" business.

It could also be a matter of user count/growth focused metrics; as you go searching for that second billion users, an obvious path to go down is to continually dumb-down the product to make sure that it presents no obstacle to anyone signing on, even if the overall value they generate is lessened.

I am continually disappointed at the lack of "graduated" interfaces, where you can choose to unlock customization or advanced tools if you need it. It's not like trillion-dollar firms don't have the R&D budget for it, but they seemingly lack the incentive structure.

I've used Thunderbird with gmail since basically forever. It works fine.

On Mac I use Mimestream and like it a lot. It’s a native client dedicated to gmail.