Gmail Contacts is BrainDead

I am not a Google hater, but some of their designs and functionality completely escape me. The latest in my rants is their contact management capability in Gmail. Its not just broken, its braindead.

Who doesn’t need contacts to synch with other applications? And what’s the complication in providing an export facility that works off of tagged contacts instead of the entire file? And their field management of contacts is perhaps 10 years old. Its like they are afraid to bring a database to bear on business data. That may be a great idea, but they are making the use of this product very difficult for all but the casual users.

I am one step from going back to Outlook as much as I dislike the product because it actually facilitates me getting work done (via blackberry or good synching to PDA’s) and enables the mobile worker — something Google appears to be clueless about.

Maybe its because they don’t travel much?

While they are paving new ground in online applications, they had better be concerned that new players with off-line and on-line features far in excess of Google’s are going to turn Google into the next Microsoft — late, ugly and slow.

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