I used to respect you, I used to think, wow you really know what you’re doing. Your products are so great. I'd love to squirt my babies all over your face… no hang on… wait… ok that last bit was Natalie Portman, but anyway Google, I used to think you were pretty fucking cool. That was until I realized that you'd suddenly started to go wrong. So I thought I'd write this to tell you where and why you lost it.

Kind of all started out with G-Mail. Nothing wrong with that service for sure. I'd been a die hard Hotmail fan for many years but as anyone knows, you spend enough time around Microsoft applications and you start to get pissed off with the way they work.

So when I finally got around to checking out Gmail I was pleased to jump ship and sign on with the people who'd brought me a search engine that delivered. I had high hopes.

Don't get me wrong Gmail works great, but there is one facet of it and later of your newer products that drives me four shades of mental (and I'm pretty mental to start with).

What is it? I'll tell you. It's your obsession with making your interfaces different from everyone else's. You see there are some things (and I'm talking about human/computer interface things here) that are the way they are because that's the right way to do them. There are things that have been developed over years and years of customer interaction and have proven to be understandable by and convenient for end users.

Google my dear, please stop trying to change those things. Now I'm sure you probably have rooms full of "Innovation Engineers" or "Imagination Activists" or some such twaddle, sitting around thinking about how to make new and useful products, and that's great. But here's a hint: keep those guys away from your interface design department. Because it's your interfaces that are letting you down.

For example let's take a look Gmail and a feature that's common across all other mail programs I've ever used and yet which you decided for some reason wasn't going to be needed in Gmail; Folders…

Now Folders are a real world item, "I seen em", everyone has. You put things in them for safe keeping or just to keep things tidy. And that analogy worked perfectly for email too. My inbox is full of stuff… stick it in a folder for safe keeping. But no Google you decided that the folder should be replaced with Tags. Now Tags are real world objects as well, you put them on your suitcase but the analogy doesn't work with mail. Nobody puts tags on their letters in the real world, they're much more likely to put their letters in oh… I don't know, a draw or maybe yeah… A FOLDER.

Now I want to keep this short so I'm only going to give you one more example, after which I suggest you hire some "Customer Expectation Evangelists" or something to help get you back on track.

It wasn't in fact the folder issue that pissed me off enough to write this, it was the "busy" timer in Google Chrome. I installed Chrome because at the time I was having problems getting Firefox to work correctly (nobody mentions Internet Explorer round these parts boy). So while I was temporarily without Firefox you had a perfect opportunity to show me how great Chrome was and convince me forget the fox. But you failed… you failed almost instantly and over something exceptionally trivial that you really really didn't need to reengineer. It was the little busy icon, or egg timer or please wait clock or whatever you want to call it. You see, like a lot of other timers on computers it is simply there to show the user that the process they have requested is taking a little time for some reason and that their computer has not crashed but is busy… please wait. Simple, and we all get it.

Microsoft and Apple plumped for an egg timer analogy and just about everyone else in the world went for either a little bar or a little rotating clock… including you Google. But the clock wasn't "Google" enough for you was it. The fact that we all know what it is and what it means wasn't enough for you. You had to dick with it so that it was different from everyone else, without any consideration for user expectation or conventions that are based on what people know and therefore understand. Such a simple little thing, but you just had to dick with it. And you know what you did don't you… hell yes, of course you do, because you went and did it on purpose just to be different, you had to mix it up a bit even down here at this level. For those readers out there who are not Google I'll explain it very simply.

The timer clock in Google Chrome works in the same way as the one in Firefox. It's a little circle that sweeps round in a clock like manner indicating the passing of time. Except unlike every other clock and clock like timer I've ever seen ANYWHERE… Google's one runs anti-clockwise.

And that dear Google, is why you're an idiot.