Making Contact With Mr. Gmail
Google's Todd Jackson carries the weight of the web on his shoulders. As the product manager for Gmail, it's his responsibility to make sure your inbox experience is fast, secure and always available. Jackson is also the product manager for Buzz …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gmail has been on a steady climb through the corpus: from the productivity-tip era of early 2007, through the Gmail 2.0 interface overhaul in late 2007, to a late-2008 look at what Gmail does better than its webmail rivals. What has changed with this piece is the lens — Webmonkey turns attention from the product to the person, profiling Todd Jackson as the single product manager accountable for the inbox being fast, secure and always available.
Two confirmed facts frame why that matters beyond a profile: Jackson also runs product for Google Buzz, meaning the inbox and Google's social experiment share one owner, and Google Apps generates only about $50 million a year — small enough that Gmail's strategic weight rests on consumer reach rather than paid seats. Against Comscore's February 2010 count of 890 million worldwide Google visitors, the inbox Jackson steers sits on one of the largest audiences on the web.
First-order effects
- Every Gmail user inherits whatever Jackson prioritizes next — and because he holds the Buzz portfolio too, social features ship through the same inbox roadmap rather than a separate product team.
Second-order effects
- Webmail competitors trying to counter the advantages catalogued in the 2008 comparison now chase a target that keeps adding social functionality inside the inbox, forcing them to respond on engagement rather than storage or price alone.
Third-order effects
- If one owner keeps fusing mail and social sharing, the inbox consolidates from a communications utility into an identity-and-sharing surface — raising the long-term stakes over who controls users' default email accounts.
The trend: Email clients are absorbing social-networking features, turning the inbox — not a standalone destination — into the battleground for consumer engagement.