[jsnell]

Yeah, that infallible data-driven juggernaut is the image you want to project outside.

But in reality the people whose promotions and bonuses are riding on a successful launch of the redesign are also the ones cherry-picking the metrics of success. It doesn't matter if it's universally hated and actively drives people to use IMAP clients. There will be some bullshit statistic that'll go up. Hell, most metrics are going up anyway for a service like GMail, and it's not like this is being A/B tested.