Mailbox has gotten quite a lot of press recently in advance of the release of their new iOS app, which promises to reduce email clutter and bring users to the ever elusive inbox zero. There's no doubt that Orchestra, the design team behind Mailbox, are brilliant app developers, having received accolades from their everyone-connected to-do list. But the question is - Will Mailbox Win? Or, from a business/longevity standpoint, will mailbox become a viable replacement email client for your mobile device?
Mailbox's most brilliant flourish has not been their design or technology - it's been their reservation system. By showing users exactly where they stand in line, as well as the number of people who are standing behind them, they have created a sense of anticipation around the app's release: "Dude, look at me, I'm number 1,750 and there are 22,000 people behind me! You better get in line before it gets too long." The important thing to note, though, is that the length of the line does not mean that the product itself is world beating - just that there's enough curiosity around what the product is to induce people to line up.
Email is an emotional tool for all of us because everyone has it and we use it all day, every day for our most important correspondences. Unlike social networks, which are self-contained universes of non-essential comments and pictures, email is a communication ecosystem that acts as the conduit for, and repository of, crucial messages in a variety of forms. Its flexibility as a medium - long form, short form, social, professional, pictures, documents, calendar, tasks, data storage, confirmations, deals - means that it is difficult to simply replace it because it gets a bit gummed up. As I've said in another post, that's like saying, "Man I really hate traffic, so let's rip up the interstate system and rebuild it with something more efficient." So back to Mailbox.
What problem is Mailbox solving, specifically? Well, they're saying that because we get so many emails, it's hard to manage that flow of information. Rather than dealing with the email in that moment (by replying, archiving, deleting or foldering), we need to remove it from our list and deal with it later. So the crux of the argument is, if you receive an onslaught of messages, a meaningful percentage of which you want to deal with later, you should use Mailbox PROVIDED that you don't use any tools included in your existing client to preform the same functionality. I'll concede that, especially with mobile clients, the work around for managing email this way is less than efficient. You'd probably have to create a "LATER" tag and then archive the message to create a similar process. But it wouldn't be as functional (different reminder times, etc.)
But the question is not what you get, but what you LOSE. Your mobile and (especially) desktop clients are designed to let you do all kinds of things, so Mailbox has to match that functionality and precision and then provide its value-added functionality on top of it. It also has to ensure that it syncs perfectly with the underlying server so that it delivers all of your messages properly. Since Gmail spoiled us 8 years ago with virtually unlimited storage, that's an awful lot of work to expect from a company with no revenue model who's competing against the incumbent clients Apple ($137bn cash on balance sheet) and Google ($48bn cash on balance sheet).
My prediction is that, of the 1.5mm people who stood in line, a very small percentage of them will abandon their existing client in favor of Mailbox. A smaller percentage will tell their friends - ie the Viral loop will dwindle to zero instead of growing exponentially - and Mailbox will find itself in the hairy predicament of not knowing just who it is targeting with this product. Perhaps with a big chunk of funding, they could be Xobni-esque and acquire more users and root around for a business model, but the likelier outcome - if they don't pull a fluent.io and "move on to different things" - is that they will pull a Sparrow and get acquired for their talent as designers and developers. And the beast of consumer email marches on...
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