[robbedpeter]

It's lazy and greedy and arrogant. It's catering to the lowest common denominator, pushing users into a cycle of manipulation and constant change, preventing any nuanced use of software, forcing users to increased dependence on a walled garden.

It's a dark pattern - don't let people use the software in unexpected ways that might take potential profit away from another service or future feature. If any use gives more value than was intended, that use will be curtailed, then properly monetized elsewhere, or simply (and more often than not) shut off.

If combinations of available settings reveal an actual bug, sometimes it's easier to take away the options than to fix the bug. But if it's simply a case that the software is doing things the developers don't want for any of the above reasons, they claim users are too incompetent to be trusted, and that they're removing the option for the good of the user.

It's a gross and vapid perverse incentive endemic to FAANG.

Good solutions exist for complexity and user configurations, like snapshots, reset to default, and so on. There's no excuse for mature software to lose configurability.

[ljm]

Going with Occam's Razor, I think it's really just as simple as product/engineering not making this kind of feature a priority.

Plus, we're talking about Google here, so this new desktop version was 99% likely to have been rebuilt as an MVP.

[ethbr0]

Google does have a history of specifically avoiding exposing settings to users.

See: some of the Chrome feature requests about making things user-configurable (off memory, related to download / execute behavior for enterprise web-launched apps), which Google closed with "Adding a setting would be incompatible with Chrome's design goals"

[paisawalla]

I think Occam's Razor, when it comes to Google's enterprise tools, suggests that nobody who is important to Google has complained about this. The understanding being that you can't get your voice heard unless you're a customer with 10,000+ seats.

[judge2020]

You just have to be a workspace customer at all. I have ~80 seats and the feedback menu in the Drive for Desktop interface has gotten me direct replies from the product team, which has helped them collect the info they need to diagnose issues in the app.

[paisawalla]

Have you found that feature requests (not issue reports) were also received in the same manner?

[nixass]

> Plus, we're talking about Google here

Exactly the point the referred poster was making. Google does nothing without monetization in mind

[ljm]

It's fairly well documented that many projects in Google happen because that's pretty much the only way to move up the career ladder, and once the promotions have been doled out then the project loses its original stewardship...until someone else is looking for a promotion and sets their eyes on rebuilding that project. (Case in point, the numerous failed attempts to deliver or even brand/market a messaging app).

Naturally, as is it is these days, any new product or redesign is conceived in terms of an MVP. You could argue that the industry as a whole has taken this concept far too literally over the last decade, to the point of being cultish about it.

I don't dispute the parent poster's point in general, I just think it's more indifferent than lazy/greedy/arrogant, unless it comes to search or ads. That's arguably worse, but Google's reputation for delivering increasingly mediocre versions of its products (or shitcanning them entirely) does precede it.

[kettleballroll]

As opposed to which other company?

[janto]

Maybe: as opposed to companies that exclusively rely on income from happy users of their software. As long as users are locked into Google's platform it doesn't matter to their bottom line if an individual product is at best "good enough". Google can make money out of the user's engagement in other ways.

[tux3]

Mozilla?

They're not the paragon of virtue I want them to be, but it sure fucking ain't Google.

My point is that there are shades and degrees of bad behavior. It's a mistake to handwave every company as equally bad.

That feeling is how you normalize horribly immoral things.

[pessimizer]

What difference does that make? This is an observation about Google's motives, not an argument that they're the only company who has those motives.