Google's Failed Prank Shows A Deeply Confused Company

Google has pulled a lot of pranks in its day, but this has got to be the worst one. The idea was called "Mic Drop:" a special send button in Gmail that would replace your signature with a Gif of one of Despicable Me's minions dropping a mic, the idea being that once you sent that email you wouldn't be able to receive any responses. The company decided to implement it with a little Mic Drop button right next to the normal "send" button, without much in the way of explanation. So people started clicking it by accident and inadvertently ruining their careers/lives. Fun!

Problems started immediately: you can take a look at Andy Baio's twitter for some of the more egregious ones. The Guardian points to a poster on a Google help forum who described how Google's fun little feature cost them their job:

"Thanks to Mic Drop I just lost my job. I am a writer and had a deadline to meet. I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. I inadvertently sent the email using the "Mic Drop" send button.There were corrections that needed to be made on my articles and I never received her replies. My boss took offense to the Mic Drop animation and assumed that I didn't reply to her because I thought her input was petty (hence the Mic Drop). I just woke up to a very angry voicemail from her which is how I found out about this "hilarious" prank."

The company disabled the feature with a mea culpa on blogspot: "Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry. The feature has been turned off. If you are still seeing it, please reload your Gmail page."

It's indicative of how Google continues to awkwardly accept its role as the most powerful information company on Earth. Google is fun! The annual glut of pranks seem to say. We're wacky and innovative, making fun of ourselves and you at the same time! The company usually doubles down, actually developing the joke products as proof of just how committed they are to the idea of tech that can be fun. But, as Mic Drop's catastrophic hour or so proves, that doesn't always jive with a company that runs a mail service that more than 1 Billion people depend on for daily communication. Google is a utility, essentially. It's like if an electric company decided to pull an April Fool's prank where it sent power surges through all your outlets.

Remember one of Google's unofficial mottoes: Move Fast, Break Things? Fun for a scrappy startup, less so for a corporate giant. In this case, the "things broken" are regular people who thought they could depend on Gmail. Whoops.