Google, on the other hand, has to accommodate folks from all corners of life, and make operations obvious to everyone they encounter, so it didn’t take rocket science to decide to use actual words for the top navigation. This pretty much eliminates elegance as a design objective for Google, whereas it’s essential at Apple. This is a web-based approach. Of course, this might also help explain the recent high-profile exodus of design-types from Google.

I use Gmail because it is fast, reliable, and provides plenty of storage free of charge. In other words, it is the underlying service that Gmail provides which makes it indispensable to so many, not its user interface. That being said, however, Gmail’s “threading” of messages is absolutely brilliant. Apple — quite wisely — decided to do the same thing with text messages on the iPhone.

You talk about something specific i.e. mobileMe and make general statements about aesthetics.

That is obviously a problematic approach.

the iPhone works BECAUSE of it’s graphic approach. A game works BEACAUSE of it’s graphic approach. The OS Desktop works BECAUSE of it’s graphic approach.

At the end of the day all that gmail really have going for them is speed. Which is of course a great great feature.

I wrote a little criticism of it if you’re interested: Whose Top Sites?

My main criticism of gmail is that I still have to search for the ‘Compose message’ link despite having used it for a couple of years. Some icons to accompany the text would help, I think.

If I’m using a browser I expect to see web pages and all the associated conventions.

There’s something to be said for the over-polished, iconography driven style that Apple runs with. If a person can learn the icons crucial to their needs, then the icons ARE the content, regardless of the aesthetic.

Related to that, if icons are learnt then you have connected to what the overwhelming majority of internet users long for – which is this Yahoo/AOL cartoon feel. Many people do consider Google to be the internet but many more of those people still Search for Google from their Yahoo or AOL pages… sadly. So while many people have transitioned to a Gmail state of mind, how many haven’t and what are those people used to… are they used to learning icons?

I don’t know if they are, I don’t use AOL or Yahoo. I’m an elitist. I use Google stuff. I also use Apple stuff and it’s beeaauutiful. So.. meh. I figure it’s just good to mention that aesthetic isn’t content, but icons, icons are the original content. And regardless whether those ideas are made of words (a la Google) or they are made of an image (a la Apple)… I think largely it’s a matter of learned placement too.

Tanget note: I wonder If icons have greater scalability in an every changing interface world. If the touch screen craze comes off our phones an on to other surfaces, I’d say that learned icons might lend themselves to greater versatility.

My problem is that Google apps and gmail, etc are just plain ugly. This is a show stopper for me, particularly since Apple’s apps are reasonably fast, at least for me. Also, I know that the Apple apps and web apps will soon be optimized.

Perhaps Apple is “not so fastidious about load times” because just as Google is not a design company as noted above, Apple is not a web-scale engineering company like Google. Their server architecture is probably held in place by their emphasis on quality and the iron-fistedness of Steve Jobs, and less by their technical architecture.