A senior executive at Yahoo has said that the lack of adoption of Google applications is because they are hard to use according to PC Magazine.
Yahoo's senior director of real-time communications Jeff Bonforte says that usability issues with applications such as Gmail and Google Talk are holding back people from choosing them over Yahoo's services. As of last December comScore reports Google trails Yahoo in email users 249 million to 60 million. In the IM market, Yahoo leads Google 77.9 million to 3.4 million.

Bonforte says Yahoo has had success in increasing the time spent with their messengering products by actually removing and not adding features to them. Google, on the other hand, has been adding features, a strategy Bonforte says has made it attractive with the technically-inclined crowd but which makes the applications hard for everyday people to use.