hi, could you please elaborate on that throwaway line '..takes me a little longer...'.
i'm just a user so when i saw gmail and google aps, my first thought was woohoo, i don't need to know how to do the boring back end stuff for email/calendars etc if/when i need to set a system up for myself. it's not a new idea but would you say your experience in the back end stuff blinded you to newer ways of doing things? can't remember who said it, but once you have a solution to a problem, regardless of how tortuous it is, it's always going to win out over the hassle of researching and troubleshooting an alternative, just because you know it's going to take x hours and you can budget the time accurately - especially when you have 10 things to do at once that you aren't sure of the solution to.
(btw just to be clear, i'm not hassling you - i just think there's a general principle here that youth has a natural advantage purely through not lugging the baggage of experience along with them. same in the physical sciences where i hang out except we have to wait for generational retirement for the new cycle ;-)
I admit I was joking a bit about the "getting older" and "taking longer" part. Had I played more extensively with gmail earlier, I would have switched right when it was possible to keep your domain, which I think has only been possible for a few months now. So I think a lack of knowledge about gmail played a bigger role than age. To the extent that adapting to new contexts is a reflection of "age", I am a very young person. (After using gmail for 1 day with my startup's streamfocus.com domain, I switched my whole architectural firm over)
As far as the age issue, in the sense that you're talking about, I've met many 20 somethings who acted "older" than me. I have always been a risk taker, an optimist, a person constantly learning to improve, and many people aren't. This is not an age issue, but an outlook on life issue.
My other excuse is that I'm "old" and it takes me a little longer to hobble reluctantly into extremely cool technology. Or maybe its that I'm so jaded from years of using Outlook/exchange, that the idea that something could be so fundamentally better hadn't occurred to me.
In any case, those days are over now :)