Time to update Zawinski’s law: any productivity SaaS grows until they release their own branded mail client.
Their own Gmail client. I have yet to see one that works with normal email.
It makes sense though -- Gmail has little in common with normal email besides usage of SMTP transport, and has a lot bigger market share than normal email. (Exchange also doesn't count as "normal email" - so that's the reason for my confident assertion.)
I don’t think it makes sense, per se, considering Gmail’s ubiquity comes from Google offering it as a free product, and then all the barriers to creating an email provider being raised in an attempt to combat spam.
There’s barely any point in setting up your own provider now because you have to compete both with free. All the action has been around email clients which have typically been acquired and then crushed.
Google could have stuck with the protocol or presented a spec for it, rather than leaving the competition with IMAP and SMTP.
What makes sense is they dominated the market and helped put up roadblocks afterwards. EEE.
I wonder why that is. Are they using some features specific to Gmail? Maybe search so that they don’t have to maintain their own indices?
Gmail is like 30% of the email market and probably higher w/ their target demographic. Normal email is the not-normal email.
Is there an equivalent law for "every enterprise app eventually adds product management features"? Slack, Google Sheets and Miro are all guilty of this. I just want chat, pivot tables and diagrams but every update is like "we just added a Gantt Chart and Task Workflow templates guys!"
It does make a lot of sense though.
I have gmail for ages now and i do not switch over to iphone/apple or microsoft. I do wait for google to provide AI features on Gmail and GDrive.
If your central live tool is notion, i would want to have my emails in it too.