Listen, Don't Talk

It’s old news by now but users of gmail will have noticed that a delete button has been added to the email programme. Well, finally ! As one of the very first users of adwords and then gmail the lack of a delete feature annoyed me most. After playing around with adwords for a few weeks I wanted to get rid of my “experiments” –but it wouldn’t let me- Their version of delete was “Hide deleted items” but I wanted them gone and gone forever! It was one of my very first suggestions to Google on how to improve their product. Looking through some of the documents penned by the “Don’t be evil” technocrati I could see why they never want us to delete stuff. They have (or had?) a very trenchant view indeed. And a worrying lack of interest in customer feedback… I have no idea if they ever got my feedback –they certainly never responded- But this latest news shows that perhaps the folks at “Search, Don’t Sort” are starting to take heed of the folks at “Listen, Don’t Talk”