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.

"Lazy" like it's an insult when in fact it's the highest praise?

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.

Except it doesn't look more professional because you could only get smithfamilyemails.com or something equally unmemorable.

3 letter non .com domains are your friend, plenty of those left for cheap

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

I really like $LASTNAME.xyz

>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.

I use Gandi's native email redirects. If you use their DNS, you can set up to 1000 redirects from and to whichever email address you want, per domain.

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)

I was going to say it didn't have a way to edit your filters, but it looks like that has appeared now. They're adding things bit by bit.

When Google Talk is discontinued, folks will gravitate to the next IM message like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger or even Twitter DM.

Gmail, well there are other client to use.

Search, umm, what can we do here? DuckGoGo?

Twitter DM is bad. Messages don't appear "immediately" so you often end up with overlapping streams of conversation. The Android app's DM interface is so slow (it freezes for a long half-second every other word) that it's almost impossible to use (thankfully the mobile site works well enough). The best tactic if you're forced to use Twitter DM for an extended or even semi-real-time conversation is to move to a different IM client.

I agree with you.

Do you think Google has a moral responsibility to provide us with tools and time to make the transition?

And, how good do the tools have to be? Just a text dump is okay, or should you be able to give it your credentials and it can do the transfer? And then who decides how many services it should make easy?

Are we being responsible now by not thinking about it?

A lot of my friends that are friends with me on FB for some reason prefer DMing me on Instagram... Such a weird trend, but it's honestly a thing amongst our group. Either that or Snapchat group chats.

Same here, weirdly enough. In order of most messages exchanged per service, in my friend circles it goes:

1. WhatsApp

2. GroupMe

3. Instagram DM

4. SMS

5. FB Messenger

6. Wickr

It'll be around the same time as Amazon discontinues EC2

Yes, it won't happen.

But suppose, for whatever reason, they decided gmail was not economical and was not bringing in enough money.

Do you think they are obligated to keep it around because our lives are on there?

What is their obligation, morally, and what is just a "nice" thing to do?

> Do you think they are obligated to keep it around because our lives are on there?

> What is their obligation, morally, and what is just a "nice" thing to do?

I'd say their moral obligation, in a practical sense, is to let people extract their email from gmail before it's taken down. As of the discontinuing of Google Reader, that seems to be something they understand.