i think the problem is you are around 30 or older, right? As someone said on another list, Google makes everything for the under 30 crowd. :)
the other thing is: who gives a shit? if Google fucked up, and it has lots of fuck ups, then Chrome will die its inevitable death.
the other reason might be this. standards aren't always so awesome. in study after study, for people using a mouse to navigate a page, it's best to put the navigation on the right side of the page. and yet hardly anyone breaks that rule -- even though it's better for the end user in a number of ways. they don't break that rule b/c there is the norm or standard and a fear of breaking it, even if it's objectively better to do so. In this case, my guess is that this monkey wrench icon on the right side of the page was based on such research. You can see why words don't work in a reading for left to right culture. Oh! So what about cultures where you read from right to left? Well, if you ask that question, then *why not* symbols instead of words -- for the same reason we have standardized traffic sign symbols.
I also highly doubt that, as Douglas Bowman described their process, they are not basing this on anything less than scientific research or something approximating it. They are making design decisions with a raft of data, statistics, focus groups, eyetracking studies, etc. IN other words, I doubt it is done on the whim of a graphic designer.
*I* work in a company where graphic designers do stuff based on whims because we don't do one lick of research and use, instead, what a UX writer called "genius design." heh. The designer thinks it's cool, so it is. The designer thinks that, from years of experience as a user herself, she can produce a UI or, more broadly, a UX that is what users need, want, desire. Google? They base everything on numbers -- which is why Doug Bowman quit.
I've just been doing a lot of evangelizing for standards in my workplace and I have great sympathy for standards.
As you noted, the history of standards and standards chaos has been about business competition. In this case Google can pretty much set the standards. People bitch about Microsoft all the time, but hardly ever Google. Google has the patina of being "open source" because it appears to be free. As I've mentioned here before, people at my workplace *think* they are all into opensource and *think* they are all opposed to proprietary models -- except when they're not. They are too young or, if older, inexperienced, to really get it. Open source has been reduced to meaning "free" in their world. They don't use open source software. They will go on and on and on about Firefox having never ever heard of the ball breaker known as Opera.
They will bitch about our company putting advertising on our pages to boost revenue, but they will rah rah rah about Google wave, as if it's not another platform for google to place ads in front of eyeballs.
it's really quite astonishing how Google has accomplished this feat.
The standard as you might know used to be inline replies and snipping all extraneous text in email replies. Microsoft's Outlook plunged a dagger into that standard. Thunderturd mimics Outlook. Gmail dealt the final blow with the "hide text" function and its lame threading bullshit.
If Microsoft had been doing same, it would have been endless whining about the company trying to r00lez the world. Well, Google's doing the same and no one whines. Google is using its market share to set standards, to force others to work to the standards they set. But Google doesn't charge (in an obvious way) for its shit, so no one bitches.
For instance, take Google's "Let's build a faster web" initiative. It's all about the user - at least as they describe it. People want web sites to be faster according to Goog. yadda yadda yadda. Yeah? Maybe so, but what Google wants is faster web sites so it can save money on the processing time it takes to crawl sites.
But Google has a big carrot it can dangle to get people to comply - and an even bigger stick. Don't build a fast enough web site? We'll whack you in the rankings.
The other day, I was showing how google is increasingly employing "channels" in its search results. It gives you three - five traditional results - text links -- and then gives you channel results such as a list of youtube videos, a list of related books on google books, and a list of related images.
No one in a room full of business strategisits, business analysts, products developers, and etc., whose job it is to understand how to create products and make money, had any clue why google would do this. It's doing this because they are flashy links to more google pages. It's a way of keeping people on google pages and, therefore, looking at more google ads at youtube, google books, and google images. What google is good at is making it appear as if they are somehow doing all this for selfless reasons -- caring about users -- and not doing any of it to make a profit.
shag
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)