I've had this debate a number of times, but in the end it's very evident that Google is an engineering company that hires designers (and not a design company th

I've had this debate a number of times, but in the end it's very evident that Google is an engineering company that hires designers (and not a design company that hires engineers). I don't think that they took design seriously at all until more recently and there hasn't been any lack of posts on HN or elsewhere talking about the growth of good web design. In short, their design has improved from 2010 and beyond due to a large push by management for updated and unified design across products, and I'd argue Matias Duarte's position on the Android team. As for the chat/mail integration, I didn't like it either. It filled my gchat with hundreds of useless contacts from gmail. That's another great point: Did they not even test these features, not even once? The gmail/chat integration sucked, and it filled my gchat buddy list of a number of users I'd emailed -once- in my life without ever asking me if I wanted to suddenly be chat-buddies with them, sharing my away/idle/etc information, etc. I'm sorry but Google has always sucked at privacy and I find it funny that you use something as poor as the chat/mail integration as an example.