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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Gmail is being rethought as a proactive assistant system.
- Google is cautious about changing workflows used by billions.
- This vision is exploratory, ambitious, and far from finished.
What is the first thing you do in the morning? For me, before I gaze lovingly at my wife and pup, and before I get coffee, I glance at my Gmail and my Slack feed. It lets me quickly ascertain whether something happened overnight that's going to demand my attention immediately during the day.
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If there's something hot, that changes my pacing. As soon as I do the most minimal of morning prep, I'll sit myself down at the computer to deal with whatever is breaking. If there's nothing on fire, I know I can have a leisurely wake-up and morning prep, gently easing into my workday.
Not everyone has my morning threat-assessment ritual. But there are roughly three billion (yes, billion) people who use Gmail. There are billions of people who, like me, spend hours each day in the app, managing their lives. There are billions of people for whom Gmail is, quite literally, the central dashboard of their lives.
The man we're going to meet today in this article has one heck of a job. As Gmail's VP of Product, Blake Barnes and his team have the incredible responsibility of crafting how billions of us will be spending our lives using Gmail, now and into the future.
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First, though, I made him a promise. This is the part I want you to pay special attention to. I told him that I would make it very clear that many of the forward-looking thoughts Blake shared are just that: future-looking ideas. These are not product commitments.
He wants to share with you, “What you can expect without making promises of exactly what is coming or when it's coming.”