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Sigh. So many fallacies. Let's take one: Google wanted to replace Gmail with G+? Umm, no. It's a complete non-sequitur. The purpose of Inbox isn't to "mediate"
by cromwellian 12y ago
Sigh. So many fallacies. Let's take one: Google wanted to replace Gmail with G+? Umm, no. It's a complete non-sequitur.
The purpose of Inbox isn't to "mediate" something for the purpose of mediating it. Elgan seems to suggest that first Google decided they had to intrude with meditation, and then came up with the idea of Inbox to justify it. The reality is, mediation falls out of the architecture of email anyway.
Most day to day interpersonal communication has moved away from email and into chat apps. Your email outside of work is largely an incoming federated asynchronous dumping ground for receipts, bills, notifications, and other things. It's become unmanageable for many people, a nuisance.
Inbox is an attempt to improve the experience of email given the reality of how it's used. All email is mediated. The way RFC822 email works is, MTA's transfer messages between services, and MUAs are responsible for the presentation of that email to users. MUAs mediate mail, for example, IMAP4 SEARCH and folders are mediation mechanisms for mail. Mail clients are free to present data from MUAs in any form they want. The fact that people have largely copied the same 'From,Subject,Date' table format that's been with us for the last 30 years isn't part of any spec, it's for lack of trying.
Inbox changes nothing about the unpinnings of mail (SMTP), what it wants to do is change the user interface that presents the mail so that it has superior summarization, sorting, searching, and clustering. That requires some form of mediation unless done completely on the client side, but doing it completely on the client side imposes some performance downsides, especially on mobile.
It's not as if Gmail doesn't "mediate". It spam filters, it has priority inbox, it automatically puts stuff into tabs like "Promotions". Even providing indexing and searching of mail is a form of meditation.
Elgan has penned an opinion piece that tries to impute some reason for Inbox other than what user interface designers and product managers have been aiming for -- usability goals. The implications about wanting to find excuses to mediate and take away control are utter nonsense.
- giantess 12y agoI don't think you're grasping Elgan's meaning of "mediate". He mostly means "monetize", in that Google is a company built entirely on slipping paid placements into things while disarming people's aversion (or even realization) that they're being advertised to. Gmail is mediated in the technical sense, but Gmail Adwords is hardly an efficient channel into which subtle paid manipulation can be injected. If Google started adding ads into emails in transit everyone would flip. This is suboptimal for Google. Whatever Inbox is today, it's a break from the email model that Google can freely evolve into a channel optimized for injecting paid content, in a way that people won't be outraged over. When everyone is using Inbox, Google calls the shots over what you see and true "mediation" can begin. > Inbox is an attempt to improve the experience of email given the reality of how it's used. No, Inbox is a Product by a company that holds a monopoly on Internet advertising. They're not in the business of improving the experience of email with a free product. They'e ultimately in the business of finding more subtle and effective ways to deliver ads. If you refuse to believe this, then congratulations to Google for a mission accomplished.
- cromwellian 12y agoYou are absolutely wrong on that last point. That is not how products are developed at Google and it is not how Inbox was developed. I work on Inbox, and I have never once, ever, in three years, seen anyone mention how this will be used to enhance ads or monetization. The entire focus, every single design doc, every single product manager meeting, has been on improving the experience of email for the user. The ads division is mostly firewalled off from the daily concerns of people developing products at Google. They supply cash to the treasury, people think up cool ideas and try to implement them. It works just like startups, where you don't always know what your business model is going to be. Gmail started as a 20% project, not as a grand plan to create an ad channel. Lots of projects and products at Google have no business model, no revenue model, the company does throw money at projects and "figure it out later" how it'll make money. Do you think Johnny Ive, when designing the Apple Watch is concerned more with the business side of how they'll up-sell different watch bands to make money, or do you think he is absolutely focused on delivering a product experience that is fantastic and that if they do a good job, the business will do well? Someone may figure out how to shove ads into Inbox later. There are separate teams who figure stuff like that out. But those people are not the ones who control the product features, purpose, or design goals. They don't come to us and say 'Hey, we want to sell more ad space in Gmail, do you think you could come up with a UI to cluster emails so we can surface more ads?' That is not how things work. Products start with ideas to solve user problems, not with ads. Notice, G+ has been out for years and still doesn't show ads. Do you think G+ was designed to show ads? It was not, otherwise it would have shown them already. Someone will retroactively figure out how to do it at some point. In the same vein that Twitter was launched without knowing how they'd put ads in it. Products at Google, from Search, to Mail, Calendar, Docs, et al are designed primary to help users. If we do a good job, we will retain our user base, and someone will figure out how to convert that to revenue, be it ads, or direct payments. Ads are a necessary evil, but they are not the primary motivating force driving designs or features, either inside Google, or in the wider startup community.
- freshhawk 12y agoYou are making a distinction that doesn't matter to people who don't work at Google. Of course the products are designed by those building them primarily to help users, that's how you run a dev team properly. But the strategic decisions about what projects get funding and promotion and integration into the google ecosystem and cross promotion, etc. take these things into account. So the end result is that, like every other company on the planet, how revenue is generated affects how products are made. The fact that it's indirect at Google is actually the norm. "they are not the primary motivating force driving designs or features, either inside Google, or in the wider startup community" If Ads are the primary revenue generator and the company is long lived then they are one of the primary motivating factors, it's just good management to hide that from the passionate makers who build great things because it is a distraction and a fucking downer.
- zobzu 12y agoSo many people these day argue their own case based on "this is a fallacy" to support their argument (instead of only needing factual arguments) then go with a fallacy of their own.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]