The Gmail part would go something like: Google discontinues Gmail and Google Inbox is the replacement! Then a year later, Google intros Mail from Google, a new webmail client that is like Inbox, but has more of the classic email interface UX that users expect. A year later, they announce Inbox is going away and everyone should move to Mail from Google, which they have rebranded "Gmail".
In a den of lions when saying this, but companies that do that have too many engineers.
There's a "right" size for any project and going over it's hard to avoid over-thought, over-complicated, user-confusing, pedantic, semantic things.
This isn't the trite "too many cooks" argument. It's that the right kind of quick-and-dirty shortcutters who value leaving things alone produce better products; they use simpler paradigms and abstractions, have better combinable primitives, communicate purpose more effectively, and produce overall better tools.
The corollary is the stupid thing you can hack to do what you want is often better than the smart thing that is very carefully designed to do what you don't - because one of them you can technically use and the other you can't.
This is why earlier versions are frequently better than later ones and earlier products seem to do more, better, and faster. It's why smaller companies seem to produce better things, and counter-intuitively, products that take less time to finish (say a few days) seem to do better and gain more traction then the 6-month effort.
Some things really are profoundly complex, like databases and operating systems. Most things however, despite much we'd like to pretend, are not in that class of software.
And yes, these claims are cultural bomb-throwing. But the evidence for it is solid.
I think it's just as easily a sign that you might have too much or too little of a marketing department. Too much marketing influence and they create busy work for themselves like rebranding your existing products every year or so to keep them "fresh". Too little marketing influence and engineers are free to build unmarketable products without clear brands or focuses, and (closer to hand to this discussion) free to ignore the built-in good will and momentum of maintaining existing brands and products.
Sure, it's easy to blame engineers for focusing on new shiny ideas and only wanting to work in fresh codebases and "new" products, but it's just as much the fault of their management and the company not trying to adequately control its own brand(s) and how its users perceive it.
I'm contracting with Google. This is exactly the kind of argument I've been tying to make to my boss for over a year but to no avail. They come up with pet names for me to express how weird they think that type of engineering is.
I am reminded of the scene with the Slurm Queen in Futurama talking about "reintroducing Slurm Classic", as a jab on Coke.
Realistically, if Google discontinued Gmail, people would move to other email providers. There's plenty of big ones.
BTW: Want to avoid being caught in that eventuality, but don't want to stop using Gmail? Buy yourself a personal domain name (for your last name or some such) on https://www.gandi.net/ and set up a redirect to your @gmail.com address. Your email is now john@smith instead of johnsmith@gmail. Congratulations, it looks a thousand times more professional, and you have it for life; if gmail dies, you can move providers without changing your email.
then all those signup forms with bad regular expressions can ruin your afternoon. I maintain an obscure .com only because the various gTLDs i could use regularly fail these naive validations. Some sites dont even properly handle ccTLDs
>and set up a redirect to your @gmail.com address.
What do you recommend for this?
I've been wanting to do this for some time, but that means I either need to:
* Use GMail for work, which does not seem tailored for personal used (it's paid, I can't easilly find the price and it seems a bit odd to use Google solution to avoid problems with Google)
* Send all mails to my personal server and setup a redirect there to GMail (which forces me to make sure that my server is always up, so I might as well use my own mail server)
Is there a better solution? I wish there was some way to define e-mail alias at the DNS level.
Reading startupdiscuss' response, I was saying to my self, no way Google discontinues Gmail, that's just silly. Then I read your reply and my heart rate went up. I've really got to look into alternative paid replacements for Google's services. I have my whole domain tied to my Google account, and that's making me feel uneasy now that I think about it.
Notice how Inbox has a "Gmail" link? Even Google appears to still concede that Inbox is missing sufficient features that some people need to be able to get back to Gmail from time to type (tried getting Inbox to stop putting things in your spam folder? Yeah, it's lacking a "Not spam" button)
