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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."
Ultimately, our users will decide.
We now have a new policy at Google!!!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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Google Hopes To One Day Replace Gmail With Inbox
Oh hellllllllllllllllllllllll, no!
Time to exclusively use Outlook... I like my emails just the way they are, thank you very much. I don't need some algorithm go through my emails and tell ME what IT thinks is important or not to me.
Webmail is webmail is webmail. WTF is Inbox and how is it different from Webmail or IMAP?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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?
Gripe about Google all you want, but GMail is a pretty solid product IMO. If they decide to replace it, they had better have *DAMN* good reason to do so, and they need to have the users on board with the change *BEFORE* they do it. Just talking about changing such a solid and deeply absorbed product makes my buttcheeks clench. If they screw it up it means lots of miserable people. I hope Google has seen the Windows H8 debacle and truly will listen to it's revenue-generating eyeballs (not customers, but drivers of ad revenue). Poking the eyeballs, well, in the eye, will hurt their bottom line just as badly as MS boldly going where their customers did not want them to go.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
What we found was that email works as a todo list for many people
Who exactly are these people? I've never seen a single person use email this way.
Google engineers are just bunch of narcissistic douchebags. (Hey, I went through their hiring process - I know the types who would fit perfectly!)
GMail was one of the first indicators.
They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.
But they would go on "reinventing" e-mail forever, with colors, tabs, bars, circles, ovals, shapes, and probably in far future odors. Because sitting down and making a finished product takes a commitment. But the only thing Google has ever apparently committed itself to.... Squirrel!
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Google
I don't have a gmail account, or a google account.
I use Seamonkey, and my ISP's email, and also have a domain with 1and1
As an IMAP back end for a real email client.
#DeleteChrome
Dear Google,
Hi. My name is grasshoppa. You may know me from such famous threads as "Windows 8 Sucks" and "Windows 8 User Interface, wtf?". You may remember that I, along with a multitude of others, warned MS about making such a radical change to the desktop. No, wait, that's not quite right; we warned against FORCING such a radical change to the desktop. But we were assured by various astroturfers that windows 8 was the bees knees, the mutts nuts and various other wonderous bits of animals ( thank you, Sir Terry Pratchett, for that phrase ). We were called all sorts of various names for our opinions. Yet many of us stuck to our guns; we knew that a mobile interface force fed to desktop users was a recipe for failure.
Please. Listen to us now. This is a remarkable bad idea. This is the kind of idea your competitors DREAM of you implementing. It's really the only way they can get a foot hold into your market. And make no mistake; a foot hold will be all they need, because once you start down this road ( and, inevitably back track a week later due to overwhelming user criticism ), you have lost your momentum. You have lost the confidence necessary to stay that one step ahead of them. And they will then proceed to eat your lunch.
Who am I? No one really. Just some poor schmuck that will have to work with YOUR end users when you force feed them a UI change. And I'm already resentful for it.
So please. For the love of all you hold dear, PLEASE DO NOT FORCE A NEW INTERFACE on people.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
a) it's a generic term already in use in this specific application (i.e. electronic mail)
b) it's also used by inbox.com and associated (bundleware/pua) toolbar and email service
of course, history will repeat itself and google being the big bad corporation will no doubt try to steal that term for their own use and trademark.
When they start to force Inbox I will start migrating to Outlook.com. I can not stand using it i tried it for a week and just found myself damn annoyed with it. I have a working system for using my GMail and if they mess with it I'm gone as a user.
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?
I've used gmail since it was a baby, but at least I always used redirected emails that point there. So I can, in theory, switch out. I wonder if they'll drop POP support before lowering the boom? I have so very much data in there.
I know they hinted at it being some far future change, but just being willing to say it at all is nuts. Gmail is a smashing success, that they would want to redefine email based on some user interface study is scary as shit.
There are a lot of products that start off successfully, but then some bean counters or yahoos (Hey!) come along and improve it. Example: Thorlo Socks. They started off with some very nice, expensive sport socks. Recently I went to buy some, and now they have so many varieties of socks I can't find the damn original on their website.
Beware product improvement!
Seriously: do we use google products because they are great, or because they dominate the market?
Then I realised its landing page is one of those tablet only "Fullscreen picture! Scroll down you couch potato!" pages and closed the tab.
... and see which one works better.
Before you force users looking for alternatives just because someone made a bad decision
I'm not in until I can switch clients and servers. My current IMAP system lets me use pretty much any email provider and any email client I want.Over the years, I've used several of each of those, and figure I'll have to keep switching once in a while.
Inbox pretty much locks me in to gmail and Inbox (or dial it back to a regular email client). That doesn't work for me, no matter what its features. Amongs which local backup seems to be missing.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I guess it is time to start paying for a mail account at a proper mail provider where i am the customer and not the product.
What is it with google and fucking up their product? Search has degraded noticeably over the past months, the new version of maps is buggy as fuck and worse than the first implementations of maps. Gmail is also constantly getting worse.
You know you are in trouble when fucking microsoft is designig better user interfaces than you (Tileworld and FULL CAPS OFFICE RIBBON MENU included)
Inbox is even worse than the previous replacement of GTalk by Hangouts... Who would have guessed...
I've replaced Gmail with my own Linux email server. And I now have an anonymous login for Google services. I no longer trust that shit company.
I've really only been using gmail up to now because they were a reasonably good option for keeping my mailboxes relatively spam-free and viewing my mail on multiple devices. As my gmail box increasingly is filled up with inane chatter and low-quality job recruiters and they make it harder and harder to find relevant emails that I'm looking for, the more I'm inclined to move toward a different solution. I'd guess a lot of their customers use them simply because they're the least shitty option. It's kind of a bummer that a thirty-year-old glorified text editor seems to be a much better option than anything else that's out there. Perhaps I should experiment with synching my mailbox with git-annex and go back to using that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But will it allow me to sort like Outlook does?
I want sorting AND searching. Their insistence on "searching is better" is really annoying.
Via the Web I hate it. It's slow as crap - has shitty formatting options etc. But gmail is much better over IMAP - then just use the client of your choice and you're good.
I hate the threading feature too. That takes much getting used to on their web product.
.. or at least, it should be. It obviously has some nods to the methodology, like deferring actions for later.
What it needs is better context support, a proper 'tickler', and a full-featured API.
Now I can't say for sure how many people did move to G+. What I can absolutely say is that I'm not one of them. I used to use iGoogle and now I use My Yahoo. So instead of enjoying whatever metrics they used to gather from me and ads they now get nothing. Google+ is what it is and occasionally I look at it, but presently Google offer nothing which could be called a homepage and so I take my eyeballs elsewhere.
I have no idea what InBox is but the way it's being talked up would make me incredibly fearful of what could befall GMail. GMail is popular because it is online email with a nice GUI - nothing more, nothing less. It they replace it with some bullshit "stream", or a "network", or "social experience", or some glorified "wall", then they can fuck the hell straight off. Put that shit over in G+ where it belongs and don't even think of integrating or replacing GMail with it.
If you are using google for work email, I hope you have read the ToS: http://www.google.com/intl/en/...
This from Jason Cornwell, who decided to "allow" us to write shorter emails by "allowing" us to use a tiny little non-resizable compose window in Gmail.
Okay, that's not 100% true. You can switch to "full-screen" mode, which enlarges it to a size that is neither all of the screen nor even just all of the window. But it does "kindly" grey out all the GUI elements that the "full-screen" window isn't covering up and disallows you from interacting with them without minimizing the window.
But i guess it make senses. If he can just make Gmail unappealing enough then of course we'll all switch to Inbox, right?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That would be nice, though it doesn't seem like how Google usually works... I can think of several instances where Google decided it knew best, rolled out changes to products that made them slower and crappier, and said, "you'll love this, so we made the changes mandatory!" I can only think of a single instance (the new Maps a few months ago) where they gave something an overhaul that left it cripplingly slow and which removed several key features, and provided us the option to go back to permanently still using the old one that worked better (actually permanently, I hope...)
Reminds me of a story from The Dilbert Principle, about an office that provided free drinks of various kinds, but then decided nominally as an experiment, but actually as a cost-cutting measure, to not buy new drinks until all the drinks had been drank. The "experiment" "proved" that everyone liked the unpopular flavors, as they got drank (once everything else was gone).
Since when does "hope so" turn into them actually doing it?
Can I please just keep my email, please? I don't want your filters, I don't want you telling me that I've got ten minutes to board a plane as I already sodding know this. Whenever anyone tries to apply an algorithm to my data they manage to hide the things I care about and show me nothing but the bullshit I can't stand. Does this really have to be the fate of my email, as well?
Anyone?
because people don't get paid for not "working". Same thing with Microsoft and whomever else. They constantly fuck shit up because new is better even if it isn't.
I've tried Inbox. It's as shit as every other attempt to hide away emails in favour of highlighting what it thinks is important.
Force this on users, and I'll finally, permanently switch my email provider.
"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."
I call bullshit, based on the way they treated Gmail users with their awful "new compose" interface that they rammed down everyone's throat, despite the many, many users who had repeatedly resisted moving to it every time it was "suggested" to them, and some 24 year old Silicon Valley hipsters decided they knew better than everyone else and that we'd just grow to like it if we'd use it. I can't speak for everyone else, but I still hate it, and I suspect I'll hate Inbox just as much. Based on my participation in and reading of Google's own product forums re: the "New Compose" and other bugs or issues, it is also apparent to me that Google doesn't even listen to their own volunteer shills there, much less the actual users. I have never once, that I knew of, seen a response from an actual Google employee to a complaint about a product of theirs. Ultimately, they'll do whatever the hell the latest batch of "The-ink-may-still-be-wet-on-my-diploma-but-I-know-more-about-computing-than-everyone-else" CS majors decide they think is "cool" and justifies them keeping their jobs by being "innovative" and "progressive" and following the latest trend, whatever it may be.
"The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users"
I must have a different definition of casual and power user.
email is a productivity tool. Inbox is not. only 5 emails fit on my screen, the rest is bloat, whitespace and features that are cool at first, but I don't use them anymore after 2 days...
Right?
First of all, why didn't they include the ability to read or send messages to/from accounts other than Gmail, like Gmail currently lets you do now? Second, how is Inbox able to fill in blank avatars from business email addresses with company logos? Is it getting help from Chrome or something? Nice feature though, just wonder how it works.