Slashdot Mirror
Google Hopes To One Day Replace Gmail With Inbox
An anonymous reader writes Three Inbox by Gmail engineers today answered questions as part of a Reddit AMA session. Most of the answers were tidbits we've heard of before, but one stood out to us: Google plans to eventually replace Gmail with Inbox. In response to the question "Do you think Inbox will replace Gmail on the long road?," lead designer Jason Cornwell gave the following answer: "In the short term, no. In the very long term, we hope so. Inbox is something new — that's why we're launching it as a separate product. We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users, to which Cornwell replied: "They are not aimed at fundamentally different audiences. Both Gmail and Inbox are designed to scale from low volume to high volume users."
As if the gmail auto threading wasn't bad enough at hiding things from you, now they will filter and what is important? (For advertising...) Why is it that every new upgrade seems like a kick to the groin lately?
the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders
Interesting, I thought the most basic and oldest function of email was sending a message.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I almost never see anyone who DOESN'T use it that way, at least in the business world (of course, ironically, Inbox doesn't support Google for Works yet...)
Emails are basically a queue of action items, a lot of which are resolved as "won't fix", so to speak (ie: spam, marketing emails, etc), leaving in the inbox the stuff you're supposed to get back to at some point.
Inbox is fantastic for that.
The Google page just says that it will be good for me.
It looks generally like a dumbed down phone style app. "lots of whitespace" etc.
There is a *lot* of room for improvement in GMail that does not involve pissing about with the UI. Like being able to add a summary to an email thread. Like being able to break email threads which become muddled. Like being able to add additional meta data do emails and use them for simple applications. People have been asking for these for years, but the MBAs that now seem to run Google do not listen.
But it does not look like Inbox is any of these things,.
Anyone actually tried it?
Or to sign up to Google plus to comment on Youtube or the Android store. Saw one poor chap put up a video because he couldn't get his quite expensive piece of equipment to work. I know the answer. Couldn't put it up. That's how you're serving your customers, Google.
Sell it to me then, jesus. I'll happily pay a yearly subscription to Gmail if they remove all ads and data mining and don't fuck with the interface too much.
I'm adblocking anyway but I'm sure they are still churning away at my data.
That's what I was thinking. If one is forced into radical change, then all bets are off.
The thing of it is, I don't really understand what's wrong with e-mail. I've used e-mail since my BBS days in the early nineties, graduating to fidonet, then to my first Internet-connected BBS with PINE in 1994. E-mail clients eventually followed the Usenet model and started threading replies together which is probably Gmail's best feature, and then the interconnectedness allowing mail, contacts, phone entries, docs, etc to work together helped make Google's user services extremely easy to use across devices.
I have my doubts that they can significantly improve e-mail. It still comes down to opening each e-mail and reading it, however it's parsed, sorted, compartmentalized, split, etc.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.