Business Insight Zone

One of the pitfalls (or advantages) of writing a business blog is that you start thinking of the business-bloggy angles on everything.

• Conversation about Yu-Gi-Oh! cards with my six-year-old son? Could be something about marketing to the younger set and how Upper Deck is harnessing it. (Note: these conversations are very one-sided in the boy’s favor.)
• Patriots-Colts game? All kinds of thoughts about the nature of excellence and different leadership styles.
• The latest environmental story? Might do something on how smart companies can harness this for their own benefit.

And so on. This morning my thoughts are on the changes Google has been making to Gmail, which I use for most of my non-work-related e-mail. The look and feel are slightly different, which doesn’t bother me, but the new version has degraded, from my perspective, in three ways:

1. It’s much slower filling in addresses when I start typing them in. In the past I’ve been able to find the right address by typing two or three characters, but it’s hit-and-miss now: sometimes the addresses fill in, sometimes they don’t. When they do, it takes longer.
2. I often work between an open e-mail and another window of my Firefox browser, e.g. when I’m sending a link to a friend. But the new programming on Gmail makes it hard to shift from one Firefox window to the other using only keystrokes. This forces me to use the mouse, which is slow.
3. Gmail has a great tagging system, which I use relentlessly. But in the past I could use the arrow keys and the “Page Up” and “Page Down” buttons to skip around on the dropdown list of my tags, and the new programming prevents that. Again, I have to go to the mouse, which slows me down.

Okay, those are my minor beefs. My larger beef is that there’s no obvious and easy way to provide this feedback straight to Google. Even that may be small potatoes, but still it rankles.

Now here’s the larger question prompting this whole post: Does Google owe me an easy feedback mechanism? They’ve got a couple of years’ worth of my e-mails sitting on their servers, plus all of my friends write to me at that address, so it’s not likely that I’ll stop using Gmail because of these little annoyances. Oh yeah — Gmail has always been free, too, so it would be easy for them to tell me “You get what you pay for.” Not that they would, but that they could.

I don’t know the answer to this, so I put it out there as food for thought. I pay Google nothing and use the free services they offer me. Then again I’m a heavy user in their whole ecosystem of targeted online ads. So how responsive do they need to be to me?