I would caution against trusting Google too much, either. Google is notorious for being unresponsive to customer complaints, feature requests, and bug reports for their products, especially for some of their offerings that have been around for a long time, such as Gmail and Google Calendar.
Of course, you are complaining about the products and services that Google has been expanding into while I was referring directly to the search engine for which Google is best known, such that
Google has become a verb. It's like Xerox as a company having established itself for "dry photography" (the very basis of the company's name) but then having diversified into other products (eg, the development of GUIs, laser printers, and Ethernet at Xerox PARC, which the company then gave away to Apple and 3Com), but we daily use the company name as a verb whenever we "xerox" a document.
As long as companies refuse to tell us how to use their products, especially the extra features that they advertise and present to customers as the reason to buy their product and not the competition's, we have no alternative but to
Google for that information. Without that ability to
Google, we are lost;
Google'ing is our only friend in this ridiculous situation.
Not
Google'ing, as you inadvertantly advocated, is to embrace ignorance as a way of life. Which to me has always been a definition for stupidity -- "To be ignorant is human; to embrace ignorance is stupid."
It all comes down, in my belief, to Pyg's earlier statement about "dumbing" technology down in recent (i.e. the past 15) years (not just M$, but all large high tech companies in general). This is to lower the barrier of entry into the consumer tech world, so that, for example, Pyg's 80-year-old mother can even use Windows to begin with. By necessity, it must become simpler for novices to use. Lowest common denominator effect, basically.
Yes, making it simpler to use does make the product more accessible. But when you add features and offer the user no instructions on how to use or work with those features, then how does that make it easier for the user to access those features? That such tactics instead have the opposite effect of making it much more difficult, impossibly difficult for most, should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer.
For example, the main menu is very helpful for the novice to be able to look for a way to do things in the application. So then how does it make using the application easier for the novice when you
hide the main menu from him/her? And offer only a secret keyboard shortcut (Alt-t) to display it; keyboard shortcuts being the tool of advanced users and not of novices.
Another tool to make things easier for novices is the dialog box. In WinXP and before, search offered a dialog box for setting up the search. That dialog box would even hide the advanced search features so as to not confuse novices, but still made access to those advanced search features obvious for those who wanted them. Now in Vista/Win7 there is no dialog box at all and all users must use a cryptic and complex
search filter which still does not provide any apparent way to differentiate between file names and content. Do you really believe that
that makes searching easier for the user? If so, then there's a bridge in New York City that I'd like to sell you.
On a small side note, for those of you who are so inclined, I would recommend reading Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm". It was one of our required reading books in one of my classes in college.
Would you care to provide us with a summary? Or at least the thesis?
Including where the author advocates keeping the user ignorant of how to use the features that you had advertised and for which they had bought it?
'/'Search <foldername>' text box in Windows Explorer? Or is this in another application like Outlook?