First off, yes, Google messed up here. They even acknowledged it themselves and took it down asap once they realized it.
But second, people need to cut Google a little slack here. We all make mistakes, or errors in judgement, and Google is no different. Do we really want to live in a world where companies are afraid to innovate and try anything new, because people are going to jump on their backs if things don't work out? Part of the reason why Google was able to create so many great products, like Maps, Mail and so on, is because they've created an environment that's very conducive to creativity and experimentation.
As a consumer, I love the fact that Google has given me so many awesome productivity tools, with great features, completely for free, and I don't want them to ever lose the creative/experimental culture that made it possible. If you're not a fan of such a culture, if you just want a no-nonsense humorless stable suit-driven product, well, Microsoft has you well covered.
What this fiasco has to do with innovation, sorry? This is merely a puerile joke, it's like pissin' in the kitchen and shoutin' "April fools!" I can't believe that some people with +$100.000 wages came up with such an idea, and some manager approved it, and the team implemented this, and deployed it, and not a single sane person was there to say, hey, this can bust someone. I'd sack whomever involved.
There's a difference between being blocked from innovation and having UX engineers look at something. It is the job of these folks to find out things like this; they don't have blinkers on when it comes to knowing about how the app gets used and how people can fail at things.
It's quite likely that this was just directly shipped given that it's a one-day thing.
Nobody's asking them to stop innovating; you can be more rigorous in your shipping process (which they usually are) without affecting innovation.
Reading replies to this I think it might be a good idea to take a few deep breaths, then consider just how small this mistake is, how it should be a lesson learned and that no one needs to be fired over it.
So you're saying that this is all getting a little too silly? I hereby award you the first ever HN Colonel prize. It may not have come off exactly right, but it was still pretty funny. If we stop getting April fools pranks from Google, the internet will be a materially worse place.
Or maybe the buttons I click shouldn't suddenly change without warning? This isn't a case of a user ignoring an important dialog box then wondering why their computer doesn't work anymore; the button just suddenly started to do something different, which is terrible user interface design.
To put it another way, how am I supposed to get anything done when I'm spending all my time making sure the interface doesn't change beneath my feet?
It replaced the Send And Archive button that lives next to Send. (Adding a new one is still a bad idea, imho, but would have been borderline forgivable)
