Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Google, please borrow from 37Signals

I love Google Apps. I really do. I find that I hardly ever open Microsoft Office products anymore.

But, because I've been using Apps from the beginning, all of my documents are under my personal Google login. This is also true for most of my co-workers who also adopted Apps early on. This wasn't much of a problem, but now Google has released a "team edition" and wants me to migrate everything over to a new Google account associated with my work email.

But wait... there are no tools to migrate between accounts! There's no easy navigation to switch between my Google Docs for my personal account and my work account. Please, Google, take a quick look at 37Signals who has solved this problem very well with their Open Bar. Do that and provide me with a tool to move docs between accounts and I'll be happy.

Why am I complaining about this? It feels to me that Google is treating their loyal users just like Microsoft did with Office 2007. When Microsoft launched the new Office, the re-design seemed to be geared towards people who had never used Office before, not geared towards the millions who had learned for over a decade how to use the old user interface. Google is doing a similar thing. They're launching new functionality that is geared almost exclusively towards new users, not towards the users that have been around since the early days.

So, come on Google. Throw your loyal users a bone and help us use your new features. Provide a migration path. Something. Please.

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