Well, my point was that the analogy shows the problem with the rest of the post - he's applying a faulty standard to judging if the changes are good ones or not.
If it's just griping that he doesn't like the changes, fine, but if his point is that these are bad changes that don't make sense for the product, then he needs to pick a better analogy.
Everyone wants simpler, more intuitive products, unless it disrupts their particular workflow. http://xkcd.com/1172/
That's a pretty broad statement. It seems like what he's written is that it's gotten worse for someone with his use cases, which I'm not arguing (and I fall in that camp.) But we're also not representative of the average email user, which we sometimes have a tendency to forget when judging product changes.
Photoshop is extremely customisable and full-featured which is what I was getting at. Draw Something is fun and light which works well as a mobile app.
I don't know about the average email user but after 10,000+ hours of using email, I feel like I'm pretty proficient at email :)
Understood... but all your points are about the negatives of that, and none are about the positives.
It's pretty easy to come up with a bunch of arbitrary gripes about any major UX change. But you haven't made any effort to contemplate why these changes might make a lot of sense.
For example, you're complaining about the need to do two clicks to make a link, but it seems to me that 90% of the time people just paste in a URL and gmail deals with it properly. Separately entering a link and URL is more like writing HTML and I don't expect regular users do that... and frankly, I'd rather just have the URL anyway. If you knew that users were only using the "add link" icon maybe 1% of the time, wouldn't you move it down a level as well? Or just get rid of it?
I'm a super, super heavy Gmail user - I average ~6,000 emails a month received on my work account, and a smaller but similar flow on my personal gmail. I know and use the keyboard shortcuts. I generally find the mole and the new text formatting UX a bit annoying - but from a product usability perspective - not a design perspective - I can see why they make a lot of sense.
The line between mobile and desktop is rapidly blurring into irrelevance at this point... I'd guess gmail is used from mobile more than desktop at this point, and "mobile" devices are starting to look more and more like "desktops" when it comes to things like tablets, Android laptops (more of which are reportedly coming from the major OEMs over the next few months) and the Surface.
Expect to see more web services looking more like mobile, because while it used to be they were primarily web sites with mobile access, they're turning into mobile apps with some desktop web access. Installed base on PC vs. mobile should cross over this year, and usage trend is already ahead of that for lots of services.
If it's just griping that he doesn't like the changes, fine, but if his point is that these are bad changes that don't make sense for the product, then he needs to pick a better analogy.
Everyone wants simpler, more intuitive products, unless it disrupts their particular workflow. http://xkcd.com/1172/