Gmail?s Permanent Failure: Only Humans Can Build Software For Humans

Editor's note: Guest author Adam Rifkin is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles. In this post he argues that Gmail is perhaps not the best vessel for Google's social ambitions.

Last week was marred for me by a temporary but super-painful Gmail failure, and the software's behavior points to why a "more social" Gmail would be a PERMANENT FAILURE. It pains me to write this because I actually believe the Gmail team has been the best web application team long-term in the entire company, and they come way closer than anyone else inside Google to understanding how normal people work and think.

So it's telling that even within the Gmail team, there is a basic, fundamental, deep-seeded inability to put things together in a contextually graceful way that makes sense to actual (non-Googler) users?in other words, to deliver a great user experience. Let me explain with a personal experience.

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