There's a stage in every company's development when the smart people leave and the company runs on autopilot from then on, in a zombie-like half-life. It happened to Hewlett-Packard when Dr. Hewlett and Dr. Packard passed on; it happened to Apple when Steve Jobs left the first time, and it happened to eBay and PayPal ages ago (as anyone who has ever tried to find an actual human being to help them with a problem knows to their sorrow).

Now I'm wondering if it's happening to Google. Their "new look" for Gmail is a train wreck. Where did all the emphasis on tiny, faint gray text come from? Is everyone over thirty supposed to find a new mail provider right now?

Some mail threads are extended by adding comments to the top of the existing material, so there needs to be a "Reply" button at the top of the message as well as the bottom. Where did it go?

I've found no advantage in the new look, and, so far, I've heard of no one else who does so, either? So why is Google riling us all up by telling us that the old look will soon go away forever? It's not as if they don't have hundreds of thousands of servers! They can keep the old version, the one their smart people designed before they all left, as a sort of shrine to the company they used to be.