I'm going to miss Google

I mean, it'll be awhile, but they've gone and decided to die.

Inbox by Gmail was going to be the new email application; new design, treat email as a task list (which is pretty accurate for how most people use it), auto-bundle stuff and allow management by bundles.  Leverages the kind of information management stuff Google's both skilled at and advantaged in.

Nigh-all of this except the bundles has been ported over to gmail; there's a (highly dubious) claim the bundles are going to be ported to gmail.  (That's the sort of feature, like "what encoding do we use for *char?" that has to go in at the beginning, at design time, because its presence informs everything else.)  There's probably a way somewhere to make the gmail app's colour scheme stop being shrieky, but there really isn't a way to make it (with the bundles) actually work half as well as inbox does.

Which is kinda beside the point, unfortunately.

Rumour -- highly plausible rumour -- has it that the business decision to kill the Inbox app, rather than the Gmail app, comes down to "Inbox makes it too easy to dodge promo emails".

Google's original business model was "let's get more people using the Internet".  That worked, in large part because there was a vast amount of unrealized utility available.  Now, though, it's turning into "let's glue eyeballs to ads".  Which, well.

You can have success, or you can have control.   Both is not an option.

This is Google deciding that it MUST have control.

That'll kill ya.