
Gmail graduates 3 Labs features - vsloo
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/12/06/gmail-graduates-3-labs-features-send-and-archive-default-reply-to-all-and-quote-selected-text/
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ChuckMcM
I realized the other day that web scale makes differentiation hard. Gmail is
the poster child for it.

I hate Gmail, at first I was neutral on it, then I went to work for Google and
got to see it used "in production" as it were and found how it could be really
useful, then stuff I liked (layout, features) got changed and/or deleted and I
now I don't like it.

Now there is nothing wrong per se with Gmail, its doing its thing and I'm
doing mine, but I cannot step off the train. I can't just not buy the upgrade
and stay with the feature set I like, the train keeps moving, I get sucked
along with it. We pay for Gmail for our company, as a paying customer the
majority of our users wanted to stay with the old format, we could not. Not an
option. I supposed that it true of IT shops that are built on top of Notes or
Exchange as well, you get what you get.

I stopped using Gmail labs features when I realized that if they don't
"graduate" they vanish. And if you've grown to depend on them, you're screwed.

Sigh.

~~~
vsloo
It's expected for users to be fickle. One day they'll like something and the
next day they'll leave. Gmail simply provides a platform for facilitating this
phenomenon without divulging too much of their resources. I'd say it's a win-
win?

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mbrubeck
Yay, "Send and Archive" is my favorite labs feature. It saves me _seconds_
every day. Okay, that might not sound like much but it also makes responding
to my email that much less of a chore, which makes me happy.

~~~
jedbrown
Unfortunately, it was broken with the gmail redesign and is still broken. I
open a thread with 30 new messages, select part of a message half way down,
hit 'r', and find myself editing a reply to the very last message. Instead, I
have to click an extra time to change the focus to the message (with no visual
indication) before selecting it. Selecting text from a message should be
sufficient indication to reply to that message, without needing to reposition
the invisible focus. This bug costs me minutes per day.

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jakozaur
Well Google Labs seems to be an innovative approach to product development.
Quite surprised that I can't name other company which follow that approach.
Could work if you have some truly passionate users.

Although they missed a few potential features (see Rapportive and friends).

~~~
tommi
Nokia Beta Labs since 2007.

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mrng
Direct link to the official announcement:

<https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Gmail/posts/H1mkyyY2nW4>

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arscan
Some discussion about the quote one from last week:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838810>

Spoiler: some people strongly dislike it.

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RDDavies
"Default reply to all"

This isn't a feature. It's a bug.

~~~
afterburner
I see many mistaken "Reply"'s every month, and I think I've only seen one
mistaken "Reply to all" in my _life_.

~~~
modeless
You've never seen an email storm then? They're most often started by a
mistaken "Reply all". <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm>

~~~
pcl
In my experience, they've been caused by misconfigured listservs.

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drakeandrews
Every time I see a new batch of features graduated from labs I still look to
see if they've deigned to bring back the right-click-and-hold navigation to
labs. It broke my usage habits for months when they "retired" it (and still
does, every now and then).

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frozenport
Is there somebody at Google who made $200,000 by inserting the widget for
`Reply to All`?

~~~
whichdan
Deploying _any_ change to 400m+ users is extremely non-trivial.

