Google reminds users to "Call Dad", makes users angry

This is on the money. It's a psychology-of-UI issue - where the Google front page feels like a public space, the logged-in side of Gmail feels more like a private area. This means that while a holiday Google Doodle sails by just fine, a reminder in Gmail feels very invasive.

Those answering "just get over it" are clearly not interested in building applications that people enjoy using.

Presumably then, you're a reasonable person. I can assure you though, that if a shopping mall put up a sign like that they'd be flooded with complaints.

Ultimately, it's a cost/benefit analysis for the company involved.

Gay marriage is a contentious issue presently, Father's Day isn't really. You can find a subset of people who are offended by any implication of supporting any idea or cause.

That's why I'm a little torn on this issue. You can object to the fact that Google is putting a non-deletable reminder into people's tasks. You can also object to the fact that Google is taking a Pro-Father's Day stance. I happen to think the first objection is more reasonable (but I can sympathize with the second one, even if I think it's not a really great example of a company offending people with a stance).

There are a few sides to this one:

On the practical, implementation detail side of this, users should have been allowed to remove the item. I'm sure the reason that didn't happen is simply because of the way it was implemented, and implementing the item as something that was actually per-user would simply have pushed into the 'not happening' zone.

As regards, morals, sensibilities and where the hell 'right' is on the larger picture the answer is 'who knows?' - Personally, I think the fact that a slight prompting would have resulted in millions of tiny acts of goodness, and a few larger ones of users being upset, but there's no particular metric one can apply there. My intuition says the balance falls largely on the side of it being a net postitive for their users at large, and their families too.

As far as those offended go, I'm sort of reminded of the parallels with doctors and malpractice suits - hundreds of lives saved, helped, made more comfortable, and it' can take one slip-up to undo all of it. No, it's not a 'gtfover it', but it's not so much the message appearing as the inability to control it that led to a small slight being taken as an offense. Anger is almost always fear, and fear almost always a simple desire to not be hurt, and the inability to stop it continuing to prompt them - that likely just resonated with the aspects of whatever hurt in the first place, whether it was mortality, abuse or anything else.

No one meant any offense, and there was a person, and then people who thought they'd do something they thought would be good, and might make a few people happier (and possibly serve their employer's larger aims too).

They didn't do a bad thing. They did a good thing, badly.

It is true that this may hit feelings of some people. If we are blaming them, lets also blame Apple(app store) and a lot others. Unfortunately we have to learn to adapt and let go of these things... Internet is quite insensitive

When there is a perfectly good objective argument to be made (in this case, that undeletable reminders is a bad user experience), I do think an appeal to emotion is ineffective if not fallacious.

In this case, the particular emotional appeal seems either insincere or unreasonable. Are people who have bad or deceased fathers offended by the very notion of Father's Day and the marketing around it? I doubt it, but even if they are, I think it would be entirely unreasonable, and rare enough for Google to risk or ignore.

Remember, anyone can choose at any time to be offended by anything, whether or not other people would consider them reasonable. People can also feign being offended to attempt to bring attention and credibility to an otherwise legitimate argument. Anyone who publishes any text on the Internet is liable to have someone claim the text to be offensive. I don't think any reasonable person would see this reminder and think that Google was mockingly telling them to call their abusive or dead father.