Back in August 2013, I applied to be an APM at Google (for the third time). During the process, they ask you to write an essay to evaluate your "writing skills, depth of product insight, and depth of competitive analysis." The prompt itself was the following:
What product or service has been brought to market in the past two years that you think is particularly revolutionary? How is this product designed to change and improve the consumer experience? How could it be improved, and how do you anticipate it changing/evolving in the future? What competitive challenges does this product face, and how will this product eventually change its space's competitive climate? While it is OK to focus on some of these questions more than others, your essay should be sure to answer each of them.
At the time, I used Mailbox obsessively. "Inbox Zero" was something I tried to accomplish every day, and snoozing emails helped focus on what to care about at any given time. It still does. But this was also when Mailbox was still fairly new and rough around the edges.
I recently pulled this up again and, reading through it, I was surprised by how many of my random thoughts turned out to be right. In particular, that not being able to search your email quickly and reliably has made it imposible to use Mailbox exclusively and that not providing a more complete feature set would make it easy for Gmail to take over the market they created. What's especially disappointing to reflect on is just how much the Dropbox aquisition did end up shaping Mailbox's direction. I was also wrong about some stuff, and I'm mortified that I start the essay with a sentence involing both the word "disrupted" and the phrase "mobile email space."
Today, I use Gmail's Inbox app when I'm on my phone. It's a less pleasant experience than Mailbox, but never needing to switch apps when I'm looking for an email that's a couple weeks old makse a huge difference. It also doesn't force me to log in with my Dropbox account, but that's another story...
Anyway, please email me with your thoughts!
The Mailbox app has disrupted the mobile email space by enabling users to treat their email like a ToDo list. Its success stems primarily from two keys insights: people on the go just want to triage their email and people derive satisfaction from an empty inbox. While neither of these ideas is particularly profound, Mailbox’s product is compelling because it is hyper focused on these issues. In particular, Mailbox implemented two features that nail the “triage” use case perfectly. The first of these is the snooze system, which allows you to delay an email. The concept of snoozing email has existed for years in Outlook, but had been missing on mobile before Mailbox came along. Furthermore, snoozing an email in Mailbox only requires two steps, and getting it back in your inbox requires no steps at all. Existing work-arounds in other mobile mail apps are inferior in both those dimensions. The second innovative feature that simplified mobile email is Mailbox’s system of swipe gestures. In particular, archiving and deleting email can be done with just one swipe in Mailbox, whereas other apps require at least two actions to archive OR delete a message, never both. Mailbox’s early enhancements point to additional improvements to this use case. The ability to resolve multiple emails with a single gesture is so powerful it’s shocking that it didn’t exist before.
What struck me most about Mailbox’s initial release is that these features actually changed the behavior of my disorganized friends. They began setting up filters to archive mailing lists or trash mass mailings. For many people, my friends included, emails ARE tasks. With Mailbox in hand, my friends began to put controls in place so that any email that made it into their inbox required an action. They were encouraged by the ease of Mailbox’s tools, which make organization and efficiency feel much more tractable. In addition, the value of those characteristics is reinforced and made salient by the satisfaction of reaching “Inbox Zero” and seeing the image of the day. Having an empty inbox is no longer just about email: it’s about having nothing left to do. The pleasure of an empty inbox is so compelling that even when I’m in front of my computer I have found myself pulling out my phone in order to snooze an email.
Mailbox’s hyper-focused effort to streamline email on mobile has, however, led to a less than adequate tool for power users. If Mailbox is to successfully turn email into a ToDo list, then it needs to be a complete email tool as well as a task manager. The most glaring shortcoming is in searching email. The existing search functionality does not go back very far into your email history and there is no way to force a full search of the server as there is in Gmail, Sparrow, or Mac Mail. Looking something up from a week or a month ago is an incredibly common use case, and one for which Mailbox falls far short. Similarly, there is no way to save a draft of a response. Therefore, if you make it a few lines into a response before realizing it requires more thought, that work is wasted. These sorts of changes are necessary for Mailbox to become a true email tool rather than just a ToDo list.
I expect Mailbox will at least implement better search functionality very soon. The acquisition of Mailbox by Dropbox will definitely accelerate the implementation because Dropbox has a ton of experience with performance and scalability. I suspect the limitation up to this point is due to the difficulty of caching all of someone’s email on Mailbox’s servers, and Dropbox’s expertise will help them overcome this challenge. It’s unclear, however, why saving drafts has not yet been implemented. It seems like the team has been focused on Dropbox related features, rather than extending the app’s core functionality. At DBX, the Dropbox developer conference, Mailbox announced that Dropbox links in an email would soon be downloadable like an attachment. While this is certainly a nice feature, it’s hard to imagine that more users were asking for this than the aforementioned enhancements. Furthermore, based on their FAQ, Mailbox seems disinclined to implement other features core to what people expect from their email. They think that viewing messages by label, for example, will clutter the app and hamper productivity. I think this is a mistake because it forces users into a specific (though efficient) workflow, dramatically increasing switching costs and slowing the number of users who adopt Mailbox.
Furthermore, Mailbox’s reticence to become a complete email tool makes them vulnerable to attack from existing mobile email apps. Until Mailbox meets users’ expectations for an email tool, it will not be the only app people use for mobile mail. This helps those other apps maintain a strong user base. If one decides to implement a similar (or identical) means of triaging email, the competitive advantage that made Mailbox successfully will immediately be gone. The Gmail app in particular could crush Mailbox by implementing a snooze functionality and an easy way to resolve emails en masse. Furthermore, Gmail has a strong presence on desktops and could therefore extend the snooze functionality to that domain, eliminating the need to switch devices to get different functionality. Similarly, if Outlook decided to create an iOS app, it would already have the necessary functionality, brand name, and user base. While both are unlikely, the threat to Mailbox will persist until it becomes a fully functional email tool as well as a ToDo list.
Without a doubt, Mailbox has completely changed the landscape of mobile email. The ability to treat emails as tasks has changed the way people think about their inbox. As a result, the ability to snooze a message will become so core to the way people manage email on the go that I expect it to appear in all mobile mail apps alongside “compose” and “delete”. Time will tell whether they can maintain their market lead. If they get sidetracked by Dropbox integration features, they may lose their competitive edge. On the other hand, maybe we’ll see a revolutionary cross-platform service that allows you to easily access your files, emails, and (with Dropbox’s datastore API) app data from anywhere. If Dropbox creates a collaborative document editing tool, something they are almost certainly working on, such a service could challenge both Google and Microsoft in the enterprise space. Now that would be an impressive legacy for a project that started as another tool for task management.