From the “When all you’ve got is a hammer” department
Fascinating piece about business tunnel vision. Google is protesting a california state guideline that email software have the ability to sort (by sender, date, subject) etc.
Gmail doesn’t do that. It relies, naturally, on search as the sole method of locating an email. According to this article, it can’t conceive of another way that users might want to look for emails. (Maybe they should try searching for something new.)
Outlook has had pretty great search for some time (in fact, I’m a little disappointed in how they seem to have degraded the search functionality by adding extraneous features in 2010). I frequently use search. But I constantly use sort to find emails. Why? Because I frequently need to look at emails according to who they were sent by or when they were sent, neither of which are problems that search solves particularly well. Google, because it is a search company, can’t conceive of a problem that can’t be solved by better search.
Microsoft (until Xbox, and we know how that’s gone) can’t conceive of a problem that can’t be solved by Windows. Forcing solutions into what you’ve got to sell, instead of creating solutions that match what people will buy, will get you into trouble every time.
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