An Open Letter To Google

Dear Google,

I know you'll never read this.  However, after our long and tedious years of mutually taking advantage of each other, I want to say I will never leave you.  But there are a few things you can do to make our lives more enjoyable, and justify the shameless harvesting of our personal information.

Give us choices.  I know it's tempting to harvest all the information you can, but by giving users a choice you will win people over to your side without being a complete bully.  Let people opt out of what you want them to do, at the expense of what you know they want most.  It's simple, it works, and the person at least has the choice to control information usage if they care about it.  This would open your market up to all the private folks.  Right now, people who are holding back or won't join or share because of privacy concerns are the only real obstacle you face to dominate the web.  Think it through.

Keep it up with Google+.  You have finally managed to hit Facebook in it's weak spot, the overwhelming amount of crap and spam posts that drive us nuts.  Google+ not only lets us filter those easily, because it's not so damned overpopulated we can enjoy content that is much closer to what we want to see.  Plus, the ability to host meetings and ad hoc group chats is amazing.  Again, there could be more freedom and choices, but this is one case where your clean and narrow design really works.  Please don't screw up a good thing and go to the Mafia Wars side.

Stop messing around already and make a Google Workspace.  With Docs and Sites as two invaluable services, why not make a quick progression and let us have something with all the utilities in easy reach?  The personalized Google page isn't enough, but if you want us to rely on your products giving us a place to live is crucial.  This would rely on heavy customization, but we just had that talk.  Docs has given us so many ways to be productive and share, sites gives us virtual offices to use, but when it comes to purely our view, we are aliens without a home.  Host some built-in IDEs as well and look at your growth explode and stay there.  Python, Java, the basics.

And finally, while I know it's small in your view but important to others, give us some control over what we see.  Your super light and pastel blends are obnoxious.  You have allowed us dark schemes for some apps such as Gmail.  Please take fifteen minutes and give us two or three universal themes that meet the most obvious needs.  Hi-contrast, light on dark, and grayscale would be helpful.  Really, you have a whole staff of coders, this should be a Tuesday afternoon sort of project.

Sincerely,

Bon The Geek