Category: Technology Author : Steven Hodson Posted: October 30, 2008
Tags : chrome, gmail, google, google docs, Greader
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Google makes me want to gag

Since the first release of Google Chrome hit the web I decided to make an concentrated effort to use more and more of the Google apps like Gmail, Gtalk, Chrome, GReader and Docs along with a smattering use of some Google Groups. I meant this to be a serious full on effort and totally stopped using my normal suite of applications. Everything ran out of Chrome with separate pages setup to run as a Chrome application. On the whole it hasn’t been that bad of an experience - well for the most part anyway.

At some point there was one thing that really started to get on my nerves. Google stuff began to remind me of the pablum I feed my two girls when they were babies. It does the job but damn its boring shit. Really .. just how much of that pale pastel blue crap can one person stomach in a day. Jeez give me break already.

Here we have machine that literally dwarf the mega machines that powered the Apollo Moon program and the best we can come up with for style is some utilitarian blandness to wrap our applications or web apps in - come on already. I’ve seen mortuaries with more friggin life in them than these Google offering and why should we be settling for this utilitarian sameness? Have we lost that interest in having the things we use on a daily basis that we don’t care if they look boring as hell?

Personally I am so sick and tired of that color blue that it wants to make me puke every time I see it. I told my wife when she gets around to redecorating that picking that colour would be grounds for divorce. So without the slightest bit of reluctance I have returned to my previous selection of programs I used even thought they might be a little heavier on resources it’s worth it to have some life back in my desktop.

The other thing that really makes me laugh is that Google apps are so popular among the Mac crowd. This is the bunch with deep roots in the artistic and style community and yet this idea of blandness is so acceptable to them. Talk about a total dichotomy.

Oh and by the way labels in Gmail isn’t all the snitz that the Gmail fanbois make them out to be.

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins

I can't argue with one word of this.

Vezquex

My suggestion is to go to town on user styles.

Anonymous

"I changed my entire routine and all the apps I use for no reason and I hated it!"

Come on. Use the applications you like -- there's no point in trying to use all Google stuff, or all New stuff. If it works for you, great, otherwise get something else that does.

And if you want your computer programs to give you the warm fuzzies, get a dog instead.

StevenHodson

thanks for paraphrasing me in the "quote" you made up. Oh and I have a dog already.

uway

man you rule...power to the opinion.

KiL

Great article. Love your research.

1) Google colours suck therefore Google sucks
2) Mac users like Google services, ergo they have no taste and suck also
3) And by the way Google labels also suck, so there.

No line of argument, no evidence, no logic, just plain highly opinionated verbal excrement. And people post this on the Web.

I always thought that copy & past journalism is about as bad as it gets, but now we have the grumpy-old-fart-pukes-into-the-blog-journalism. Thanks you've just invented a new type of literature.

StevenHodson

excuse me - it's an opinion piece. It's not a research paper designed to win a frikken Nobel Prize. It's not an investigative post looking to win a Pulitzer Prize.

It's an opinion - my opinion - nothing more - nothing less.

You want well researched post go read some-one else. you want investigative posts you might want to go visit the Washington Post site.

F.D.

I think it's rather a sweeping statement about Mac users 'loving' these aps. Quite frankly I hate the whole idea of using online aps and data storage. Giving such a large degree of control over what you do to a handful of giant corporations is a disaster waiting to happen. The real irony here is that one of the reasons for Apple's existence is that Jobs and Wozniak didn't want only a handful of governments and corporations having a monopoly over computing power that was then rented out to Joe Public via a terminal, which is how the future of computing was widely perceived at the time. Cloud computing is in effect a return to that concept. I want to keep the aps I use on my hard-drive, under my control, without being subject to having to have a net connection, paying 'rent' for them (which will eventually happen), or being forced to upgrade software at the vendors discretion rather than mine.