Google’s Gmail Redesign Is Part of a Larger Push at the Company

In Google’s major redesign of Gmail, the biggest changes are hard to see. But first…

Today’s must-reads:

crypto-laundering suspect with links to Tornado was arrested

• Elon Musk is telling China’s censors about his vision for the future

• Are game streaming platforms delivering too much of a good thing

 The Gmail shakeup

In recent weeks, you may have noticed some big changes arriving in your Gmail: altered colors, refreshed menus and navigation tools, and a new model for interacting with other Google services within your inbox.

At first glance, it may look like a basic makeover, but with well over a billion users seemingly addicted to Google’s email platform, even the slightest of pixel shifts or button rearrangements can have serious implications for engagement and market share. The redesign is part of what product manager Neena Kamath described as a push toward a “unified Gmail,” an attempt at simplifying the way people ping-pong between web apps, something Alphabet Inc.’s search giant has long struggled to fix.

The new version of Gmail—which is rolling out on a staggered basis to the public—updates the service with Google’s evolving design language, intended to give the company’s eclectic applications consistent visual schemes and interaction features, from Android to ChromeOS. For your inbox, that essentially means Gmail’s edges are rounder, it has more interactive overlays, and its traditional white and red hues have been replaced with softer blues. To some critics, this appeared more like a data-driven reskinning than a fundamental rethink of the email system. While Google does have a history of A/B testing designs to death, the new Gmail, at least to me, so far feels more modern, smoother—and a lot like Microsoft Corp.’s rival Outlook.

Perhaps out of concern of alienating users with too many changes at once, Google has made the redesign voluntary and buried its most significant interface change in a settings option. This feature allows you to select which Google apps exist inside Gmail, including Google Chat and Google’s Meet videoconferencing tool. The buttons are displayed, like mini Gmail apps, in a new vertical bar to the left of the standard email menu links for composing messages, viewing drafts, and so forth. One could imagine Gmail adding options in the future for a variety of Google services such as Docs, Drive and Sheets—again, just like Microsoft’s competing web email client, which features buttons for Word, Excel and online files, all hugging a similarly positioned menu inside Outlook. (The similarities aren’t surprising given that Google and Microsoft—and most every other cloud and enterprise player—are in a war over selling productivity software.) 

For veterans of the staggering list of discontinued Google products and defunct Google brands, Wave, G Suite, to name just a few—this new “unified” Gmail may seem like more of the same, representing yet another crack by the company to distill disparate services into some cohesive library. Gmail, after all, is the default home-screen for millions if not billions of users. At any given moment, I, for one, am likely to have a few dozen Gmail tabs open in my browser, hopping back and forth between chats and archived emails, usually along with Google Calendar alerts, cloud files in Docs or Drive, YouTube clips, and of course, loads of Google search pages. It’s often a mess.

Some of this disorganization is inevitably getting cleaned up by browsers like Chrome and Apple Inc.’s Safari, or native apps for mobile and desktop devices. But for websites like Gmail, the question is how many apps they can really unify before the interface feels overwhelmed. In a blog post about the new Gmail, Kamath said the team tried to find the right balance between Gmail as “a standalone email application or a hub for easily moving between” Google services, noting that the common user behavior arising during the pandemic has been a mix of email, chatting, video calls and collaboration. A Google spokesperson says that within its Workspace productivity services, “We increasingly see Gmail as a central point for people to manage communication in their daily lives.”

Meaning, at least for the near term, the default mini apps inside Gmail will be Google Chat (formerly known as Hangouts), Google Meet (since merged with another video service named Google Duo), and Google Spaces (previously called Rooms). Let’s just hope the next version of Google’s email platform doesn’t rebrand Gmail.

The big story

Following its stunning rise and fall during the pandemic, Peloton is cutting hundreds of jobs, closing a significant number of retail locations, and raising prices of its exercise hardware.

What else you need to know

The Biden administration will soon unveil details of trade discussions with Taiwan, a move likely to inflame tensions with China

Tencent, expected to report its first sales drop since 2008, faces mounting struggles after $560 billion market value wipeout.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin forecasts the blockchain’s highly anticipated upgrade, known as the Merge, to finally happen next month

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli’s crypto token plunges in value

Join Bloomberg Live in London for the Bloomberg Technology Summiton September 28 to see Europe’s business leaders, policy makers, entrepreneurs and investors explain how they are adapting to this new environment—and discuss solution-based strategies.