I’m not liking it to be honest – I dislike the window placement and I don’t want to keep having to press the pop-out link each and every time to manoeuvre the window to a position I do like (i.e. not bottom right hand corner of my browser – it’s one reason I won’t use Tasks).
Google would do well to make an option to allow composition windows to be opened – by default without the extra mouse click – as an entirely separate window (or within the main message list as it was before) so that can be moved around at will, with the option to save the window position for next time.
As for hiding ALL quoted text by default when replying to messages – horrible. It’s an additional mouse click for me to make the text appear. As for having to scroll down to expand the window – again, horrible. More work. This isn’t efficiency, it’s making me work even harder to reply to emails.
If Google rolls this out to everybody (which they eventually WILL do) – this makes Gmail no better or worse than most desktop clients and I might as well just ditch Google Apps completely and roll my own mail service. Google can do what the hell it likes with the free Gmail service, but as a Google Apps for Business customer I damn well like things the way they are at the moment thankyouverymuchindeed.
This is what I really hate about Google Apps – Google solicits very little feedback from its customers before deciding to change things. If they do want feedback, the whole process feels laborious. Yes, I get it: Google Apps is all about efficiency and making it the best possible experience. That’s fine – but if you don’t like it, it is very difficult to undo what Google eventually rolls out. Sure, you can delay the changes to an extent, but rest assured you will have to eventually comply or bugger off and find some other solution.
I’ve already stopped using Google Drive/Docs because it’s clear to me that Google doesn’t want to listen. The pagination issues make Google Drive/Docs next to useless to share presentable documents outside the Google ecosystem. The Drive sync issues are outrageous and I cannot trust my data with this system. Google continues to steamroll “improvements” and I’m really finding that more often than not it’s a regression of functionality that worked perfectly well before they started tinkering.
Google has practically turned itself into another Microsoft. A company that doesn’t listen to its customers and just bulldozes it’s way forward without given a moment’s thought to what the hell it’s doing.
