"...While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users..." There's the nub of the thing, and it's not just Google. Like the old song goes, everybod

"...While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users..." There's the nub of the thing, and it's not just Google. Like the old song goes, everybody wants to rule the world. That is, if you have a popular service, you buy up other stuff, add on stuff you can do. Pretty soon your users have multiple accounts all over the place. You gotta go to some kind of single sign-on, right? It's not that it's a bad idea, it's that it's the kind of idea that shouldn't apply to the universe. It's fine when it's your corporate site. Who wants to log into three dozen corporate systems? But when you get FB tracking you everywhere, Google integrating what you thought was a browsing app with it's universe of offerings....it doesn't work. Yes, users probably wanted it, just like some of them want you to turn the damned thing off. But the key problem here is that single companies shouldn't be in the business of controlling all the information flow. Any architectural decision they make has social/political implications. For this chrome thing, they're trying to position google as the internet, not a place you go on the internet. Everybody wants to do that. And they all claim it's to help the users. But I don't want a company being the same thing as the internet, no matter what Aunt Sarah wants. It's not good for the rest of us. Add to that the way this was done, and then the engineering team being clueless? It's not that they set out to do anything wrong. At some point, anything you do is wrong. You just have too much freaking power. Google is at that point.