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These comments are pretty sad. I know we feel the need to comment on everything right away these days, but honestly there isn't much to say about this feature u
by bretthopper 13y ago
These comments are pretty sad. I know we feel the need to comment on everything right away these days, but honestly there isn't much to say about this feature until we've actually used it.
HN almost universally believes in execution over the idea, yet here we are trashing an idea before seeing the execution. It's great that Gmail is trying to innovate and improve the email experience. Maybe this feature won't work out but how about we try it out first?
- owenjones 13y agoJudging by their recent change of making GChats part of the Google+ Hangout system I am nervous and skeptical about the changes to GMail.
- taigeair 13y agoI tried the new hangout box but I'm not able to figure out how to make calls to landlines from the chatbox anymore. Did you guys have that issue?
- intrazoo 13y agoHangouts does not currently support that, but it is on the way. Hopefully it is soon!
- hadem 13y agoPerhaps you'd be happier going back to AOL or Hotmail? I don't understand the negativity around change. If they never changed, people would complain that they are in a rut, that they don't innovate, etc.
- betterunix 13y agoThe complaints are not about change in general, but about changes that are simultaneously negative and inescapable. If a new version is better, then great -- but if it is worse and you cannot continue to use the old version, you have every right to complain. I avoid being dependent on web apps for this very reason: I like to be able to downgrade when necessary.
- owenjones 13y agoJust because GMail is still better than AOL or Hotmail doesn't mean I agree with the direction it (and Google as a whole when related to Google+ is concerned) is going in. To be clear, I would be fairly optimistic for the "new Inbox" if it weren't for the new GChat interface which worsened my user experience to add a feature, Google+ integration, I don't necessarily want.
- jlmendezbonini 13y ago>Perhaps you'd be happier going back to AOL or Hotmail? Hotmail became Outlook.com a couple of months ago and it's quite nice actually :)
- aeone 13y agoWhile I do agree with your sentiment that some are being too quick to dismiss the idea without trying it, I'd like to add that this feature (or one very much like it) has actually been available in Labs for a while, so it's possible that some commenters may have real feedback on it already.
- ensmotko 13y agoActually the feature is already live (or at least I can see it), so most of the comments probably aren't based on the blog alone.
- moskie 13y agoSure, but communications are also important. If this post is giving an incorrect impression of these new features, there might be something for all of us to learn about how to communicate things to our customers.
- dannyr 13y agoIncluding people NOT reading the post? It says in the post that this feature can be turned off.
- dskhatri 13y agoKnee-jerk reactions are a big problem on this site. Perhaps there should be a delay between a story posting and comments being allowed.
- brymaster 13y agoPeople wanting to censor dissent are a big problem on this site.
- jonathanjaeger 13y agoI agree it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction, but we also have to consider the fact that people who don't like something are much more likely to speak out than people who are neutral or positive. Take into consideration how every major Facebook change has been met with a seemingly loud "boycott Facebook" petition.. on Facebook. We can't really over-police these things.
- jasonwocky 13y agoDoesn't that mean that we'd still get knee-jerk reactions from people who are latecomers to the article?
- coldtea 13y agoOK, then only allow someone to post if he has stayed in the article page for a while.
- brown9-2 13y agoBut on the other hand, what other type of reaction is possible to a blog post that advertises a new feature that most people cannot try out yet and form measured reactions to?
- slg 13y agoWhile this UI might have changed a little, the feature set isn't new. The Smartlabels Gmail Labs experiment does the same automatic categorizing and filtering. I have used the experiment for a while and it is really pretty good about knowing what is what and in turn minimizing the amount of email that I see as soon as it arrives. In my experience it has been much more helpful than priority inbox system that Google rolled out a while back.
- dirkgently 13y agoIt may look the same, but I think you are missing a bigger picture. Google is at the forefront of machine learning. They have been doing it for a long time, and lately, they have taken it to a different level with new features rolled out across their various services. For example, and you'd probably know, in Google Plus, now you can search pictures by the subject which can purely analyzes the data (without meta-data) and give you all the pictures of your cat. I guess this new Inbox works in the same vein - I don't think it's just a big table of senders and their classifications - this seems to be more intelligent than that. But it's okay to blindly criticize Google - in fact, it happens automatically if you are using a Macbook Air.
- slg 13y agoI am not sure what you think I am missing. Google has offered this type of filtering before. I have continued to use it for the last year and really enjoy it. The already existing feature is more intelligent than "a big table of senders". For example, some of the emails I receive from Amazon are sent directly to me as notifications and some are filtered away into Promotions to be viewed on my schedule. It is smart enough to know that I don't want my day interrupted by Amazon's next sale but do want to see my order confirmations from Amazon as soon as they are received. I am not criticizing Google, I am just noting that this is not a new feature but a Gmail labs experiment graduating into the main Gmail feature set with a fresh new coat of UI polish.
- barista 13y agoHeck outlook.com/Hotmail has had it for a while. I don't get what the big deal is.
- vidarh 13y agoGiven how obnoxious the new compose it, it is getting hard to trust them to do the right thing with Gmail.
- encoderer 13y agoMeh, fwiw I love the new compose.
- sinofer 13y agoOpinions can vary. I love the new compose.
- mbreese 13y agoAgreed. But I for one, can't stand it. I don't like composing emails on top of other things in the background. I find it jarring. For similar reasons, I also don't like the reply mode where you are editing within a conversation. I guess I like viewing messages in the context of a conversation, but not composing them that way. I just wish that I had the option of composing things separately. C'est la vie.
- dannyr 13y agoI love the new Compose too.
- piyush_soni 13y agoJust FWIW, I love the new Gmail compose as well. It is indeed useful to be able to go through and consult previous emails without doing the back and forth for writing one mail. And I really love Gmail for all the small convenience things they keep on doing, like including a 'Track Package' button in the 'product shipping' email's subject itself ! As far as I know, they were the first to do many innovative things, like drag and drop to attach files! They shouldn't stop trying new things.
- adastra 13y agoI did try it just now. See my above comment.
- baddox 13y agoIsn't it more like min(idea, execution)? Good execution of a bad idea (if that's even possible) is still a bad thing (not that I think this is a bad idea).
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Isn't it more like min(idea, execution)? Its more like idea * execution, where the range for each input (and the output, consequently) is [0,1].
- pseut 13y agoSo you think that it's worse than min(idea, execution)?
- eropple 13y agoI do. A mediocre idea (0.5) with a flawless execution (1.0) is probably better than a mediocre idea (0.5) with a mediocre execution (0.5). Might not be quite so linear though.
- Steuard 13y agoYou can't directly compare numerical values of "idea" to "idea * execution": the two are conceptually different things. To abuse physics terminology, the units are different. In physics, a mass of "12 kg" is not in some sense greater than a force of "6 Newtons", even though the two are related by F = m * a. Similarly here, dragonwriter is defining "quality = idea * execution", so there's no reason to expect that the numerical value of this notion of quality should be directly comparable to the numerical value of either of its components. (Comparing the value of "quality" defined this way to the value of "idea" would require assuming some specific value for "execution" for the comparison to be sensible. If you just compare the numbers directly, you're assuming perfect 1.0 execution, which probably isn't what you intended.)
- dragonwriter 13y ago> So you think that it's worse than min(idea, execution)? Generally, yes, or at least "not better and usually worse." But I said "more like idea * execution" -- compared to min(idea, execution) -- and the "more like" is important. Its not a strict mathematical relationship, and sometimes an imperfect implementation of an imperfect concept will end up better than either the implementation or the concept because it will be equivalent to a better implementation of a better concept by accident. But that's kind of exceptional case.
- beefman 13y agoThe opposite is true. I don't need to know anything more about this feature to conclude: 1. it's anti-useful for me and 2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse. Nor do I agree that execution trumps ideas. Both are necessary and insufficient for success, but execution is far easier to commoditize. Those who can't judge good ideas from bad attribute everything to execution, of course. Those who can see the failure of the cult of execution all around. Even Google is abandoning 'see what sticks' in favor of Apple's ideas-directed approach. What I see growing on HN "these days" is the notion that comments must be either positive or negative, and that they shouldn't be negative. I prefer comments, however imperfect, which strive for the truth.
- watterso 13y agoI'm having a hard time understanding what you are arguing towards but I find this thought to be quite elegantly expressed >"Both [Execution and Ideas] are necessary and insufficient for success..."
- onli 13y ago>1. it's anti-useful for me and How is it anti-useful? In which way does it hinder anything useful? >2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse. It is not. It is a buttonbar for selecting pre-categorized mails. It does nothing against email itself and doesn't change its usefuleness for discussions at all.
- turing 13y ago>2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse. I'd love to hear you expand on this, because for me it seems like the exact opposite. By taking extraneous and superficial emails out of the main view, doesn't this make e-mail better suited for serious discourse?
- beefman 13y agoPeople who are serious about email don't have this problem. The feature isn't useful much as medication for metabolic syndrome isn't useful to athletes. More generally, statistical filters I can't train are useless -- like gmail's spam filter. That's one reason I don't use gmail (I keep an account for testing). I host my own mail and my own statistical filter, which takes care of three nines of anything that isn't real correspondence with no false positives. This was a solved problem in 2003. But rather than provide features that help users learn to train their filters, google followed the other webmail providers with a shared filter. That leads to a high false positive rate (despite rigorously training it since 2004, my gmail spam box has about one false positive a month). Then there's automatic signature hiding, hiding of addressees, lack of support for constant-width typography, integration of bullshit from Plus (like insisting on autocompleting names from Plus rather than what's been previously sent and received), many facets of the new "compose experience", etc. Google have made it clear they intend to be the McDonalds of software. Too bad... I used to be such a fan. But since they make ad-supported software, the McDonalds equilibrium was bound to obtain eventually.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoWell, the thing is that the better the product gets, the bigger chance there is that any new incremental change to the parts that work good (as opposed to adding new features) will screw them up. GMail has been excellent for years, so it's understandable people get worried about such changes.
- alan_cx 13y agoIm not going to say anything what so ever about gmail, even though I have an account, almost by some sort of weirdo default. I'm just going to stick with dear old yahoo mail and leave it at that. Its might be old, even stagnant, but it is simple, clear, functional and causes me zero grief. As it has done for 15 odd years.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoYour complaint is a common one and essentially boils down to, "There are many comments here that are not appropriate for HN." People can say what they want to say, at least within HN guidelines. It's not like these are YouTube comments. And I'm not sure about the almost universal belief in execution over idea either, or at least I'm happy to be one of your counterexamples. Can't both be important? Finally, it's not like Google's proposal is equivalent to some kid's after-school project. Context matters, and in the latter case it would be quite unfair to trash it. If anything, people know that parts of Google read HN and hope somehow that their voices get heard.
- BariumBlue 13y agowell, let's say the majority of people are "smart" enough to not comment on something. Then you only get comments from the "stupid" people, giving an appearance those comments are from the majority, rather than a less constrained minority.