The black bar at the top is like working at night time, Google (the content) being the light that guides the way. Blue bars work well on the bottom, giving the feeling of floating peacefully in the ocean, yet at the top cause distress - as if the user is drowning. Yes, I'm making this shit up and trying to sound as ridiculous as OP.

Yep. The old blue on white background strip was easy to look at. The new color never looked good on Blogspot. Sometimes a single bad design choice can tip the balance between making something pleasant to use, or not.

An example: I upgraded my version of Open Office a month ago, for the first time in 3 years. There was one single change they made with the margin color in the word processor so when the left cursor is sitting at the left margin, I can't see it very easily. Because I move around documents a lot, and let the cursor sit while rereading, this is quite irritating. After a month, I've started pasting OO document text into Wordpad for editing, and repasting them into Open Office when complete. I sometimes wonder if a spy for Microsoft was behind that margin color change.

Another example: I only started using Open Office because Wordpad was similarly crippled by Microsoft a few years ago (starting with XP service pack 2, I think). Whenever you save a document, the page view changes so the cursor's at the top, also irritating after no problems with versions up to then. But I'm using it again because it seems a little less irritating than that Open Office change, which I can't find any way to fix in the menus. I suspect in that case Microsoft deliberately crippled it to force users to fork out for MS Office.

So perhaps this change will tip the balance for some users who want a new search engine. Perhaps a spy for Baidu was behind the change, or someone who's "family back home" has been influenced by Baidu.

I stand by my comment about the little things, e.g a non-changeable bad menu bar color in Google, prodding users over to Bing or Baidu.

You nailed it with this one. This is how Google rolls. They prefer generic screens to ones that are designed by humans, because they want to convey the idea that Google is not a curated source of information, but a machine generated unbiased view of the world.

I'm generalizing a bit, but this is almost verbatim what was written in In the Plex.

So are we doing astrology next or going straight to phrenology?

I was replying to the idea that they chose a more 'robotic' design than a 'humanistic' one. And used a piece from a book in which a Googler pretty much said the same thing.

Really? Did you try much, because... danger red, hot pink, puke green... that took like three seconds to think up. Ergo, I think you are engaging in at least quite a bit of hyperbole here, leading me to consider dubious pretty much everything else you said.

Can't go any deeper, so here goes:

LCDs are clear by default with a big light behind them. You can see this on any Apple laptop, the glowing logo is just the backlight (watch it fade as you lower brightness or try shining a flashlight through it). White (clear) is the default state, so it takes power to make a color. Think of an LCD watch, all of the text is black because LCDs can't create light (those are LEDs).

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fic...

Of course, it's a minuscule difference, since I'm guessing that the giant light probably uses most of the power, not the actual LCD.

This is the opposite of CRTs (hence the "90s" comment), which do actually create brightness per-pixel.

EDIT: Oh, you've edited your comment

False. Organic LED displays don't use a backlight. They use less energy to display dark colors, just as vibrunazo said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_LED

that black bar is so oppressive.

The parent of my comment might be making some joke about the 41 shades of blue that Zeldman said.

And quote from him, "There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle." http://www.zeldman.com/2009/03/20/41-shades-of-blue/

I don't know what "soon" is.

(DISCLAIMER: I work at Google, but do not work on consumer products and have no particular info about this).

Serious question.

However I think it should default to the light blue and be saved as a cookie for those who prefer not to be logged into gmail all the time.