For those of you that haven't seen the recent Forbes article on Google's interface changes -
http://blogs.forbes.com/marketshare/2010/05/11/is-google-doomed-to-repeat-the-mistake-of-new-coke/
It's interesting why people refer to New Coke as a failure; the New Coke campaign had some incredibly beneficial impacts to their business:
1. When New Coke was replaced with Coke classic, it netted Coke twice the effective shelf space
2. Changing the name of Coke to Coke Classic allowed them to change the formula as well, reducing their production costs
The point is - Google won't live or die by changes to it's experience, and the complaints of users - if that was the case, Facebook would be dead by now - unless they're loosing, rather than gaining, additional features and functionality. The changes they're referring to are actually ergonomic, and those are things people will live with, since the actually primary interface for search is the input field. The rest is just supporting functionality such as filtering, and those are ones people grow comfortable with or ignore based on exploration and experimentation.
What's your take on Google's new look?
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