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."

Comments

Re:Who's their test group?

[Shados]

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.

Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide"

[TWX]

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.