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You've probably heard the news now: Google is kill the inbox, its experimental email application that has lived with Gmail for the last four years. The service should close permanently in March.
When the inbox was announced in October 2014, Google has described it as a "coming year" – a "completely different type of inbox designed to focus on what really matters". The engineers behind her said that it was "designed for the problems we will see in the next 10 years".
Yet despite Google's clever pseudo-insurance on the important role of Inbox in the company a few months ago, it should not be surprising that the company is sending the application to its virtual graveyard more and more crowded. After all, Google is infamous with regard to its products, and with Gmail recently having inherited some of the most important features of Inbox, the writing was apparently on the wall.
Although the new Gmail hosts several significant additions inspired by Inbox, it lacks some of the most innovative elements of his brother – elements that really have the potential to transform the way we think of our inboxes. We missed a lot of those among us who had been seduced by the approach of Inbox. And that's the real shame of this decision: it marks the end not only of some spectacular ideas but also of Google's ambitious effort to reinvent e-mail at a fundamental level.
I'm talking about the seamless integration of Inbox with Google's universal reminder system – the way the app allows you to view all your reminders waiting in one place and to have them treat as a centralized task list. Whether you set a reminder on your phone, via a Google home page, or in your computer's Chrome address bar, it appears in the inbox – so you can check it and confirm that you're checking it out. You have finished, even if you missed it or inadvertently returned it to where it might have appeared.
You can use this same system to set reminders that appear only within the inbox, instead of sending you cumbersome e-mails or using a separate and detached task application with the same basic purpose. You can even make such reminders, if you wish. This is a simpler, more rational and more responsive solution to a common organizational problem.
And that does not stop there: perhaps the most useful of all, in addition to serving as a hub for regular reminders, Inbox allows you to attach reminders on individual emails. This way, when you have a task related to a specific message, you can store it on top of the email it belongs to – and then repeat it on the correct day and time.
JR When that moment arrives, the e-mail returns to your inbox with the reminder attached and displayed prominently – just above the message, both when you view it in full and when you look at the box. main reception. It's an invaluable productivity tool, and its implementation makes perfect sense.
Unless Google finally decides to bring a feature similar to Gmail, it is unfortunately difficult to reproduce it in a comparable way. Of course, Gmail has this new Tasks app in its sidebar, but it's strangely isolated from Google's main reminders system, minimally integrated with Gmail (especially on mobile), and can only contain a small part of his equivalent accomplish. And while there are third-party browser extensions that associate notes with emails in Gmail, most are not easily accessible via mobile. They are also not connected and synchronized with Google's universal callback system. Make no mistake: this is a regression in functionality, and it's a lost opportunity.
I think the absence of Inbox will open the door for some third-party companies to create a truly awesome multiplatform Gmail client, with productivity-enhancing features, such as this reminders system and the admirable diversity of Inboxes . born ideas that are now as good as dead – but as we've seen, it's easier to say than to succeed than to succeed in this type of business model.
If there is one thing we can say in closing, it is that at that time, we should all be used to the idea that Google gives us great things to then remove them a little later. Google has many assets as a company. As we are reminded this week, the commitment is not part of it.
Encouraging users to think twice before adopting a less established Google service is something the company does very well at doing.
[Android Intelligence videos at Computerworld]
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