By Dave Winer on Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 5:15 PM.
A lesson learned the hard way with real users many times over many years.
If you're going to turn a corner and force an upgrade, you want to make sure there's something in it for the user. Otherwise they're going to hate you, and they're right to.
For example, I just got a forced upgrade to GMail. A new look. It's awful and jarring. Over the years the performance of GMail has gotten steadily worse. I have all this hardware in front of me. Gigabytes of memory. Terabytes of hard drive. High bandwidth. Huge everything. And the damned computer runs slower than my Apple II did, 30 years ago.
Doing more or less the same thing.
So now Google thinks my email should be more closely tethered to their business model. They switch me over, after months of warning. Which felt like a low-grade fever. A toothache I keep putting off doing something about. A dead-end I have no way of avoiding. And when the day comes, when reality sinks in, I realize there was nothing in it for me. What I think matters not one iota. I know it's a free service. I wish there were a for-pay service I could switch to which would be easy and fast and nothing would break.
I think the free email has killed off all the good for-pay email.
I don't like where we're going.
Update: You can revert to the old look. Thanks to John Siracusa for the tip.
So now Google thinks my email should be more closely tethered to their business model. They switch me over, after months of warning. Which felt like a low-grade fever. A toothache I keep putting off doing something about. A dead-end I have no way of avoiding. And when the day comes, when reality sinks in, I realize there was nothing in it for me. What I think matters not one iota. I know it's a free service. I wish there were a for-pay service I could switch to which would be easy and fast and nothing would break. 
