Inbox Will Out Before It Is In

Google recently introduced a new app called Inbox which does for your Gmail what Google Now does for your mobile device. I am unlikely to try since my emails are directed elsewhere and are quite mundane, lacking in airline trips and multiple business and family appointments.

It appears to be a combination of the Google Now cards and the multi-tabs that Gmail already has in place. I turned off those tabs long ago.

Mike Elgan of Computerworld thinks that not only will all of us be turning off our Gmail multi-tabs, but the whole Gmail system. I don't see that happening, even in the time frame he predicts. I think that Inbox will eventually be absorbed into Gmail as just another function or simply remain an app that works with it.

He sites Google's desire to personalize all of their services,but I think that he left out one key component: the users. Like myself, most people do not have enough busy-ness to really need the kind of parsing and dicing that Google Now can do.

Certainly, people have appointments and notices and bills and such coming to their inboxes, but much is of the read and file/delete sort if not just "junk" mail. I think that this new app is going to saturate its market fairly quickly and the rest of us will survive perfectly well without it.

This will be what Google will learn as time passes and adoption slows and stagnates. People don't want different (ask Facebook about Paper for answer about different). This is why I believe that Google, at the most, will try to force it on Gmail users only to be rebuffed for its efforts and be forced to allow Inbox to be an option, not the default.

This happened with the tabs that Gmail introduced, with the forced Google+ membership and with the YouTube/Google+ intregration. Unlike Facebook (and Twiiter and it "recommended" tweets), Google does listen and modify it system, even if it takes a bit of time.

Mark Traphagen recently speculated that Google ended ended its Authorship program "was [that] the adoption rate was very low. That means that Google was working with an incomplete signal." (quote from the summary of the interview, not a direct quote).

So I see Inbox as yet another experiment that will hang around for a while and then get placed on the back burner waiting for the gas to be turned off.