content: Email isn't going to go extinct any faster than snail-mail is.  Personal emails may be on the decline, but at the end of the day, businesses will use it until there is a much better alternative. It's all the benefits of a regular letter but with the added benefit of being able to be replicated and stored indefinitely.  Hell, there's businesses that still exclusively use normal mail for all official dealings. I also don't like the assumption the author makes that all these Google products like Wave and Google+ were designed to be replacements for email, which they weren't.   Wave was Google's attempt at an expanded email/instant messaging/collaboration tool, which they abandoned, and + was Google's attempt at a social network like Facebook.  Neither was intended to accelerate the death of email, and neither did. Most of the changes being made for Inbox seem like improvements to the already existing Gmail system, not a replacement for it.  Hell, half the features planned for Inbox are already implemented into Gmail, like fetching shipping labels or flight links automatically. The only thing this new product is going to do is make email more user friendly and feature-rich, how the author managed to translate that into Google trying to completely axe Gmail, I'm not sure.  It sounds more like they're trying to breathe new life into a product that seems to be losing popularity.  EDIT:  Corrected information about Wave,