That's my quintessential problem. I want to ask questions and learn everything I can about a problem before I start, because it will save me time. My boss wants me to stop asking question and figure it out myself, because it will save him time.

Well this got political fast.

Oh yes, please! Workplace anarchy!

A (face to face) chat is only efficient for the person with all the authority. For the person expected to follow it, it sucks. There's no inherent record. There's little or no time for follow-up. There are so many pieces of needless filler "um," "ah," "you know," and so forth.

But this isn't the problem, the dilemma is not between a face-to-face chat and IM or email. The problem is bad management, caused by managers who don't know how to address their direct reports and ensure that their instructions are delivered appropriately. If Mr. Baby Boomer is perfectly fine with an in-person chat, then a good manager will know that and strive to speak face to face with them. If Ms. Millenial needs to use IM or Email, a good manager will know that and use one of those methods as much as possible.

Both my parents, both from rural areas of the Midwest, either had no refrigerator in their childhood or had one in late childhood (1960s). Icebox, sure, but if you were a farmer in the mid 20th century, which a lot of people still were, were you going to pay for ice in summer or just eat perishable goods quickly or less often? Cellars were useful in winter, smokehouses in summer, canning jars all year round, but a lot of people still didn't have an icebox, much less a refrigerator.

Oh my God, you're so right!

But that's not the wealthy people that politicians are talking about when they discuss raising taxes on the wealthy. The point was irrelevant.

30K per year is barely a living wage for the average family of 4. Try 300k a year, and you're getting closer to the definition of "rich."

I wish I could find a luxury theater like that around here. The closest I can find will serve you at the bar, and then shoo you into your movie at the appointed time. They won't blink if you carry your alcoholic beverage into the auditorium, but they certainly won't refill it for you inside.

This is just like going to the "talkies" and realizing your favorite silent movie actor has a squeaky voice and completely ruins the picture. We're just trying to plaster 2D video games into 3D systems and hoping it works out alright, instead of building games from the ground up for VR.

I'm sure it wasn't also the sticky floors, the screaming children or the guy in the seat ahead of your turning on his phone so he could check his text messages and destroy your low-light vision, right?

This guy gets it.

Ironically, I'd argue that since Schmidt left, Google's products have only gotten worse. Gmail was redesigned, and started hiding features rather than adding them. Labs was killed, mostly across the board (it still struggles on in Music, but for who knows how long?). Maps was redesigned once, twice, each time removing more of the interface and increasing the CPU/RAM utilization of hardware. Google, who used to be known for products made by (and for) power users, became a company focused on design and the democratization of the interface. Their latest introduction to Project Fi has basically completed the transformation, with Google's introductory trailer claiming that the service "just works," echoing Apple's famous adage from years ago.

That's a fair response. I can agree with the merit of your suggestion, Office 2003 is basically the same product and is moderately comparable in modern times. It doesn't have the OOXML formatted files that its successor used, but most modern systems can read the binary .doc and its siblings to a fair degree. It shares the advantage of most desktop applications in that its interface can remain literally unchanged from the day it was installed, for good or bad.

I think I'd argue that some of your current iteration examples are a bit hard to compare to those that Google shut down. Apart from shopping and 411, which have easy and popular alternatives in Amazon, eBay, and local 411 telephone services, all the rest are pretty much services that only have context on the Internet. It's difficult to compare a venerable service like retail (Amazon, eBay) to Wave, which was an experiment in combining IMs, email and Google Docs. It's certainly easy to imagine how a service like Amazon could survive without the Internet, albeit with some hardships, but not as easy to imagine a service like Google Wave. I agree, those services you listed off are still around in their current iterations that mimic their 2005 iterations reasonably well, but they have the advantage of being instantly recognizable and accessible services with direct offline analogues, something that Google Wave, iGoogle and the others didn't have.

Getting back to Office 2003, I have to point out that many of the big tech companies are even moving away from that format of desktop application. Microsoft, Apple, and of course Google, have been releasing services (Microsoft 365, iWork with iCloud, etc) that blur the line between desktop and web applications. More companies, such as Adobe, Autodesk and other industrial products are moving in this direction as well, taking their software into the cloud and offering it on a subscription basis. These products will be just as subject to the whims of their creator as was Google Wave, as fleeting as iGoogle, and able to be redesigned, restructured, have its features removed or reorganized or replaced, and possibly shut down, all on the whim of the company. Subscribers have no ownership in this situation, and are just as beholden to the goodness of the company they subscribe from to maintain the product. Even with contracts and money flowing, a business could easily decide to shutter a product line in favor of something else, especially those with broader categories of applications (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe and Google). I would propose that we haven't seen the last of shuttered services like these, and the next time it happens it will be far more shocking than Google Reader ever was.

Everything is popular and useful to someone. I didn't use any of those products heavily before they were killed, and their death didn't bother me at all. I used Windows Live Messenger heavily before Microsoft killed it, and the experience on Skype is far worse, but Microsoft isn't the worst company in the world to me. Businesses do what is best for business, and if there's a need, they fill it.