Discovered this great graphic after getting a Tweet from Guy Kawasaki.  The man is insatiable for knowledge. Get your infographic super-sized here.

So I pull up the Dilbert blog for today and Scott has more on his ongoing elevator repair saga. His new house has an elevator in it, which is great to have if you’re worth ten gabillion dollars. The elevator is having issues, and he’s a bit wound up about that. He segues into the elevator update today after riffing on Google’s Gmail:

Today I went on a scavenger hunt. Specifically I was trying to find the “reply” button on my Gmail interface. The damn thing keeps moving, depending on the length of the message. And it’s pretty well hidden in a forest of 40-some buttons sprinkled around the page that do all sorts of things I rarely or never want to do. Three of those buttons are different ways to get you back to the inbox.

To be fair, Gmail is lightning fast, and free. But did anyone with training in interface design even look at Gmail before it launched?

The Reply button has a left arrow next too it. The forward button has a right arrow. Would it kill Google to let me use the left and right arrow keys on my keyboard to do those functions, given that they already teased me about it?

I won’t say the interface design is bad, because that would imply that someone in the relevant field actually tried to make it user friendly. It looks to me as if that step got skipped.

I can always find the Reply button.  Maybe I’m special that way, plus I’m wearing my Steel Blue Dilbert sweatshirt as I write this.  When you read through the comments, you can read one from a fellow named Kevin Fox. Kevin gets all worked up, as you can see. Is “suckily” even a word? Word of advice to Kevin…tread carefully or someone’s gonna end up in a strip.

Hi Scott, I designed Gmail 6 years ago while working at Google. I’ve studied Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon and Cognitive Psychology at U.C. Berkeley. Hopefully one of those would constitute a ‘relevant field’ for designing a web mail service.

I’m sorry you’ve been having trouble finding the ‘Reply’ button on Gmail. When I designed it we kept it right at the bottom of the message, just a big text box you could just tart <sic> typing in if you wanted to.

Because some messages are really long and you know you want to reply to them without having to scroll all the way down, there’s a ‘reply’ button at the top right of ever <sic> message as well.

If you’ve used Gmail for any length of time you know that it groups messages into ‘conversations’ which, while convenient for understanding the flow of a, well, conversation, means that you can’t just have a simple ‘reply’ button in the control bar or side navigation because there wouldn’t be any way to specify which message (and therefore which person) you wanted to reply to. Putting the Reply call to action on the card itself not only makes it clear what you’re replying to, it puts it in a consistant location in relation to the message itself.

You mention that the ‘Reply button keeps moving’. Can you tell me where it used to be? I’m not aware of any changes to its placement in the last 6 years.

Anyhow, you usually sound like a nice guy, but your post was pretty insulting to someone who works hard to make products that most people enjoy well enough. I know you probably get a little sad when people ask if Dilbert could afford a real illustrator instead of a sketching hack, but now imagine that was said as a throwaway line by someone really famous whose work you actually respect a lot and you’ll get an idea of the power you wield and, in this instance, how suckily you wielded it.

Fusion Garage’s JooJoo tablet has been pushed back to a March 25 ship date due to manufacturing issues with the screen.  Which means, as Engadget’s Joanna Stern points out, is the same week another tablet is scheduled to debut.  Wonder what Apple thinks about that?

(Headline absolutely a creation of the always-clever John Paczkowski.)

A Morgan Stanley analyst mentions in a note today that some form of “gesture-based technology” may appear in the next edition of the iPhone, sometime in June.  Here’s Johnny.

One of the great music industry rumors is (possibly) laid to rest.  Her famous song “You’re So Vain” has never had a subject.  For years, she has refused to give up the name, except once where she privately disclosed the answer to NBC’s Dick Ebersol as the result of a charity auction.  Who’s the song about?  Mick Jagger?  (All these years, and as I listen to it now, I can finally hear Mick singing background.) Warren Beatty? Larry Ellison? (Imagine that.) So she re-recorded a version of the song, and in there, she whispers the name, “David.” The Interwebs are buzzing that the man in question is multi-mogul David Geffen.  Bonus: What’s that word? “Gavotte?” From Wikipedia: “You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte,”-in this context it can be taken to mean a pretentious or egotistical style of dancing.” Sure sounds like Larry.

CNET’s James Martin took a terrific set of shots, going inside the world of YouTube. Check it out.

Get ready for the world’s first commercially available jetpack. Just $75,000. Wonder how many Larry will buy?

Earlier today, El Jobso deftly covered the demise of Palm. Here’s Ruby’s letter to the troops.

Team,

This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being. On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We’re scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.

I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm.

All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience.

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

We’ll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Go team!!!

jon

This newsflash c/o The Mosspuppet, who obviously cares very much for his special friend, Gruber. He says the maven of Daring Fireball is now favoring the Ninja Turtle look…not sure why. More if/when this develops.