Sam Biddle, at Gizmodo:
Everything new from Google is prima facie fantastic, and served with the best intentions. Google is a monolithic company, sure, but it's filled with geniuses who want to make your life easier through technology. Nobody's faulting their ambition, or questioning its motives. But we have to wonder: Are these new things meant for regular people, or the data-obsessed, grace-deficient Silicon Valley nerd vanguard? As much as we wish it weren't so, the answer seems a whole hell of a lot like the latter. That the company responsible for Android is still building for robots. In each case, Google has balanced on golden fingers a product—clearly with a lot of time, thought, and money behind it—that just doesn't seem to jibe with the way we actually live our lives. There isn't any lack of effort or innovation here, but rather a gaping disconnect between the way data geeks and the rest of us see the world.
What happens when you fill a company with socially inept software engineers and allowing essential things like design take a back seat to engineering. That you can get the light bulb to work is not the ultimate goal. People have to want to use the light bulb.
