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I am not a Google Employee - but I do want to defend Google here. Yes, Google used to be a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. However, in the process they built a huge amount of UX Debt.

Bad UX was forgivable a few years ago, but that is no longer the case. Google has not figured it out yet, but with the web maturing, I am glad that they are trying to evolve to be a more UX focused company.

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I disagree. Search used to be fast and clean. Ditto GMail. Even Maps has gotten slower and more cluttered.

Google's recent UI changes are about branding, not UX.

I agree with your points. I categorize them under growing pains. Good UX is not easy - especially when you have such a large number of users and products.

If you look into the reasoning for many of the cluttered items, you will see things like "doing X would make it more readable/useful/etc for the general population".

Perhaps I am just an optimist. My fingers are crossed.

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