Google has created a slew of innovative products, born from original thinking and supporting experimentation and new ideas, and Marissa Mayer has been a large part of the company's success. Google's success was not built on design however; it was built on the humbling (if you're a designer) fact that the thinking and engineering was so good that design was almost irrelevant. I think that's generally a good wake-up call to designers, and I've tried to reinvent what I do for myself around a deeper definition of design, one that tries to encompass engineering. This is a pretty typical story for a Silicon Valley tech company design decision:
A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade. [...] Mr. Divine's team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps. Her decision was diplomatic, but it also amounted to relying on her gut rather than research. Since then, she said, she has asked her team to test the 41 gradations between the competing blues to see which ones consumers might prefer.So far, the usual. But the idea put forward by the rest of the article, however, that Marissa Mayer has a "keen sense of style and design" is false, and ridiculous. With a few exceptions, business executives almost never have a way of talking about design; it takes a lot of experience and training to do that. So, they will seize on a small detail or color preference as a way of shaping a design, or they rely on research on one small aspect. At an engineering-driven company, these kinds of details will often be the extent of the entire design discussion, with the personal pet-peeves of the executives and the vagaries of how alternatives are tested producing incoherent design direction. That dynamic is very old (probably dates back to cave-paintings), but there's absolutely no way it represents Marissa Mayer doing a good job for Google, or helping Google products to succeed.
If Google took design as seriously as they do engineering, they would not focus on details, but remaking interaction design and visual sensibility. Marissa Mayer wouldn't make a comment about grey text, she would be wondering how Google could give users better interfaces to information than an empty box. Google should swing for the fences again with new thinking, not imagine that because they are successful they do everything right.