[rubinelli]

For once, the answer to the title isn't obviously "no."

Can you imagine Gmail as the new Lotus Notes? Specially as third-party vendors flock in to fill the gaps? The potential for lock-in is absolutely dizzying; moving away from Gmail once you have your whole workflow automated would feel like going back to punch cards.

[jd]

Exactly. pg has also written about "using your email as a todo list" (in Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund) to partially address the problem of email being more than just a dumb box for all incoming information. Email as it exists today is very obviously broken, and very few players are in a position to change it. (Although there must be some startups with the frighteningly ambitious plan to replace email as we know it today.)

Of course it remains to be seen whether this is just a first move by Google towards a big goal or whether Google is just playing with new Gmail functionality to see what happens.

[rimantas]

Email is only broken from the authentification point of view. The idea of using email for every need is broken.

[ImprovedSilence]

Agreed. Do we really want Gmail to be a great operating system lacking only a decent mail client? What is this, emacs 2.0?

And so what if people are using it differently then how it was originally intended? Give me a well designed tool, and I'll use it in 930294 ways it wasn't indented to be. That doesn't mean I'm going to like the new super-multi-purpose swiss army knife version of that tool.... Keep it simple stoopid, get off my lawn, not in my back yard, go unix, etc etc </curmudgeony old person rant>

[fdr_cs]

I don't see anything broken. I send email , people receive emails . Just Works (tm) !

[alexqgb]

When people say "It's broken" what they often mean is "It works both ways".

That is to say, the power granted by email to ignore others, send badly composed missives, avoid direct engagement, and conduct extensive time-consuming posterior-covering is (horrors!) mirrored by other people's ability to do the exact same things in return.

Ultimately, any "solution" that "solves" these problems satisfactorily will do so only be frustrating others, while leaving the people with the "improved" version free to go on doing whatever irritating things they've always done in a world that can no longer push back.

EDIT: Ok, perhaps there's more to email being broken than the social problems that are beyond the scope of technical fixes. But honestly now, how much?