The Hidden Danger of Gmail Labs - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

But any creative process alternates between tightness and looseness, between brainstorming and prioritizing. And I think that Google’s ever-expanding array of services already suffers from the ills of too many different authors. While most of its products have relatively spare interfaces, the products differ as to how they work and, taken together, are harder to use than they should be. Consider, for example, all the overlapping and not entirely integrated ways that Google users can take advantage of feeds and gadgets: iGoogle, Google Desktop, Gmail, Google Reader, OpenSocial in Orkut and so on. I’m not saying any of this experimentation is wrongheaded. But once the experiments are tried, someone needs to shape what has been learned into software that gives the most power for the least amount of effort.