Since I blogged about the Google culture the other day, I might as well heap some product praise their way, too. Not only is their search engine something that I rely on regularly (i.e., incessantly), but their e-mail is pretty darn good, too.
I don't use Gmail as my every-day e-mail. I pretty much just do it for my blogging. But it is a paragon of elegant design. The feature I find most brilliant is that it keeps together all of the messages exchanged in the course of a conversation, rather than stringing them along .
No more reading through a ten-mile long e-mail string (that's lost most of its initial formatting and may have been truncated). No more three dozen messages floating around with the same attachments hogging space. (Despite my settings, in comcast I have to go in and detach all files before I reply to an e-mail that includes attachments.) No more searching and fumbling around trying to figure out if you sent that reply, or got an answer.
With Gmail, all the messages are nested there together in a virtual file folder. Ultra convenient, ultra good sense.
Yes, I know it's easier to build the "next rev" of anything. You have the advantage of hearing what works and what doesn't from people who've used the product - or you've used it youself. You get to learn from the other guys' mistakes. You can design in wonderful new features from the get go, rather than have to re-engineer the entire underlying structure and interface of something that's already built.
Still, kudos to the Googlers who designed Gmail. Simply brilliant.
No comments:
Post a Comment