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Google Workspace has the pieces for a shared inbox, why no solution, Google?

1 points by mareksotak ↗ HN
Google Workspace has had all the primitives needed for a proper shared inbox for years... labels, filters, threads, Drive, permissions, Groups,... Everything you’d expect as the foundation for a collaborative support workflow already exists.

But for some reason, Google has never shipped an actual shared inbox product that ties these pieces together.

Most teams I know end up with the same workaround: forward emails out of Gmail into yet another vendor. And with each hop, another third party gains access to customer data. It’s a strange situation, considering Workspace is supposed to be the communication core for companies.

Recently Google “announced” a shared inbox feature, but after digging into it, it looks like the same mailbox delegation system that has been around for years, simply repackaged as something new. Google does this surprisingly often.

What’s frustrating is the announcement itself, and the fact that Google has already built 95% of what’s needed for a real shared inbox. The last 5%, the part that would make it coherent and genuinely useful, never seems to arrive (like with other use cases).

That’s why we don’t really use Google Workspace to get actual team work done. All the pieces exist, but they’re not connected into anything that supports real collaboration or aligns with how modern teams actually work.

I’m not sure what the product philosophy behind Workspace is these days, but from the outside it feels increasingly disconnected from how teams actually work, and often seems to be trying to catch up in the wrong way, rather than being innovative. Has Google lost the plot here?

2 comments

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mareksotak
For context, this post comes out of a mix of frustration and curiosity. I work in product, and what drives me a bit crazy here is that all the foundational pieces for a shared inbox are sitting right there in Workspace. You can almost see how it could click together with "relatively small connective tissue" (of course, easy to say, I know nothing about their architecture).

It’s genuinely hard to understand the product reasoning when the missing pieces seem more about integration than invention.

Would actually love to hear from people who’ve worked inside Google or on Workspace: What stops this from becoming a real product targeting use cases people want? Is it technical debt, org structure, misaligned incentives, or something else?

akagusu
They don't care about this particular feature and many other features because this is not how they make money. The lack of this feature has zero impact in Google revenue and having or not having this feature also has zero impact in new users signup.