Does Google have a case of Microsoft Fever?

Story originally appeared on USA Today.

SAN FRANCISCO — Recent changes made by Google to its Gmail application remind me of something Microsoft did more than a decade ago, just before the software giant began to suffer its long slowdown in growth.

The e-mail product updates suggest the search giant's overwhelming success in dominating its markets has spawned a corporate disease that ultimately may harm Google more than any rival can.

The affliction — let's call it Microsoft Fever — is a patronizing belief that Google now knows what its users want better than those users themselves and can solve any user problem — real or imagined — by throwing more features at them.

Yet the history of consumer software reveals that when product engineers run amok, interface design suffers, leaving users often alienated by updates they never asked for, and which make a program harder to use.

I can still remember the first time I vowed to stop using all Microsoft software — just as soon as I could make a living without it.

It occurred at the turn of the last century, when Microsoft dumped on users of its PC operating system what is arguably the most unloved animated character in the history of office software.

I'm referring of course to the too-cute digital paper clip (alternately known as "Bob" or "Clippy") which first popped up on Microsoft Office desktops in 1997, a time when the company's revenue and stock price were both soaring.

Clippy, as we'll call it, used to waft over the text on my screen like Casper the Friendly Ghost — bringing along innocuous advice designed to be helpful but which in reality was almost always annoying and unwelcome.

Even though the feature was supposed to be a support tool, Clippy was far more distracting than anything else.

The engineers who designed it presumably assumed that they knew more about what I wanted to do with the software than I did, even though I was the one using it.

They didn't, and I wasn't the only user who felt that way, which is why Clippy was sent to its rightful demise after being included as a standard feature in Office versions from 1997 until 2003 (or 2004 for the Macintosh version.)

The fact that Clippy lasted even six years foretold much that was wrong at Microsoft.

Just three years after Clippy's retirement, Microsoft rolled out a sweeping update of its operating system that CEO Steve Ballmer once touted as the company's most innovative product since Windows 95.

Yet the new version of the OS, dubbed Vista, was both bulky and unstable, slowing down PCs so much that Microsoft began letting customers swap it out for free within a year.

Because media companies aren't exactly on the leading edge of technological change, it took me years to rid my livelihood of Microsoft software. By the time I did, however, the company's revenue growth had withered significantly.

As with the appearance of Clippy, the recent Gmail updates have me looking — for the first time — for an alternative to the program, which I've used exclusively for work for almost five years.

Google's decision to sort my mail into three buckets, called "primary," "social" and "promotions" has been a hassle, for several reasons.

To share just one example, if I now want to see which of my columns has garnered me more followers on Twitter — a key consideration in my trade — I now have to go looking for that data on a separate screen than the one I'm usually using.

Likewise with the way that Google keeps trying to guide me over to its own social network, dubbed Google+, when I'm logging into Gmail from my smartphone.

It seems pretty clear Google made the changes to promote Google+ and give its own ads and coupon offers an advantage of placement over those sent to my inbox from other companies.

That doesn't bother me, because we live in a capitalist system and Google exists to make a profit and not be evil, as its founders once naively asserted in their IPO registration document.

No, my biggest beef with these updates is that Google didn't get my permission before significantly changing the first screen I see at the start of every workday.

Instead, one day I logged on and, instead of seeing my familiar inbox, I saw a screen that had across its top a series of tabs that divided up my e-mail in a way that Google thought was best.

That paternalistic (or cavalier) attitude toward users — similar to when Google collected data from private WiFi networks for its Street View product — seems not only slightly evil but also off the mark.

As with Microsoft's paper clip, the changes to Gmail have annoyed more than just one cranky tech journalist.

A growing list of Google's e-mail marketing partners, ranging from Gap to Groupon to Delta Airlines, have begun sending their customers detailed instructions on how to move e-mails back into their primary inboxes — where they're more likely to see them.

I've made the same changes, but the fact that I have to spend extra time undoing what Google has done is why I'm now looking for another program to use every day.

Dominant tech companies don't fade away overnight. Rather, they and their products persist for decades — long after they stop being helpful and innovative.

But dominance leads to arrogance, which can cause companies to forget to put their users first.

After seeing what Google has done to Gmail, I strongly suspect that within the Googleplex are floating the first spores of Microsoft Fever, the same disease that spawned Clippy and presaged the end of the software giant's glory days.