A few weeks ago I finally threw in the towel on Yahoo! Mail after 16 years of use as my core email platform. I adopted Yahoo! Mail in 1999 prior to moving to Silicon Valley from New York City since my only email account at the time was employer-based. At the time, Gmail was still 5 years from release as an invite-only service. My online choices included Hotmail, AOL, and Yahoo!. I chose Yahoo! because at the time it had the best consumer ratings. I needed something portable to keep in touch with my friends. Yahoo! fit the bill and I was pretty satisfied with it. Web email clients got better with the years, and though many migrated to Gmail, the feature differences were minor and didn’t drive me to switch.

So why the sudden change? Yahoo! and Google are pretty much the same when it comes to email. Yahoo! has folders, Gmail has tags. Both are just fine for email use. The reason wasn’t the email client. The main reason for switching was for visibility of multiple shared calendars across work and personal accounts. This was painful enough to make a change.

Productivity Erosion

As a product manager and business person, I live off of my calendar. Every week includes meetings, customer engagements, deadlines, phone calls, etc. I check my work and personal calendars to know how to start my day and if I can fit in the gym before the day begins. Add to this my fiancée’s schedule and things we want and need to do together and each week gets quite full. In the context of a full day, I need to evaluate both my work and personal calendars. Working off of three calendars is untenable if they can’t be viewed as one. I needed a better solution. This was also highly relevant when looking for calendar data on my phone.

Platform Integration

I work at a start-up that uses Google Apps. This places me in Gmail, Google Calendar, and many other Google properties on a daily (and nightly) basis for work. The majority of my calendar needs are work-based, however, I can also add and edit personal events, or view my fiancée’s while on my work calendar view. This platform integration, combined with easy overlay of personal calendars, makes a win for me. It also works well enough on the phone. This integration of work and personal mail and calendaring makes changing email clients valuable enough to overcome the switching cost. This platform play has driven enough critical mass between personal and business Google use where integration matters and adds value. In fact, TechCrunch reported in November 2015 that 2M paid businesses and 3M free users are on Google Apps. That’s pretty significant, despite some very large, but shrinking legacy Outlook market share numbers.

Product Manager Perspectives

• Email is a very sticky product, partially due to network inertia. Actual switching cost may be 0, but friction is high. I’m sure I’ll continue to get email at my Yahoo! address for years as a result. POP3 to the rescue.
• Solving for life-work integration with appropriate visibility and privacy separation by permissions addresses overlapping personal/ fiancée/work calendar use cases, all of which apply to me. The integration matters by making the solution relatively simple and effective. Low friction, high value.
• Product focus. I know web email is free, and for that price, I accept advertising. I don’t, however, have to like it. Google does a much better job of not glaringly placing these all over the UI. Yahoo! Mail still feels like the year 2000 Internet with graphical left and right pane banner ads, and obvious graphical sponsored emails. I had forgotten about this by using Yahoo! Mail Plus since grad school which eliminated ads, but a clean UI isn’t a feature worth paying money for any longer.
• Network effect. Google has done a good job promoting Gmail personal use and corporate Google Apps use to the extent that enough people use it to make it a viable integrated calendar solution. That is, if my fiancée and work weren’t using them, I’d have much less incentive to move towards Gmail myself.
• This has the lowest immediate value to me, but Google does allow some platform access to third party productivity tools. I currently use the GoToMeeting plug-in with Google Calendar which is nice. I also use WebEx which does not have a vendor-provided plug-in. This is too bad since one does exist for Outlook.

Remaining Productivity Hazards

• Cross-vendor calendar interoperability is still quite poor, and this is an industry problem. This is still a common issue; especially at work. Large businesses use tend to use Exchange/Outlook. Mac users have iCal, others have Google calendars. Many of these just don’t work well together. Calendar invites to/from any vendor need to be understood and usable by all. This is a significant work productivity issue.
• The Google Calendar UI won’t give me the location of an event without opening the event. This isn’t efficient as I look at the main calendar view since I must open appointments to get simple location or conference room details.
• Message multi-tasking with web email is a mess. Web mail just doesn’t work for me that well as a business person. I am perpetually comparing multiple documents, messages, content as I work to get create clear messaging and output. A single message web mail UI isn’t that effective and opening multiple tabs to accomplish this isn’t that helpful either. As a result, I still use Outlook as the front end of Gmail with Google Apps Sync. It’s not awesome, but it’s better. This is not a concern for my personal email inbox.

Email Disruption

• Some might argue that email is dead or dying, but in my experience it is alive and well despite major shifts to mobile away from desktop. I am fascinated by Slack, HipChat, Yammer, etc. however. I do think these tools will further disrupt email, but I don’t believe email is going anywhere soon. Harvard Business Review even claims that Millennials check email more than any other age group. They just do it in bed via mobile.
• WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, or WeChat and Twitter for that matter, appear to be more disruptive for short form communications, but I still don’t think these will replace the length and multimedia attachments space email occupies when it’s needed.
• Mobile is a greater disruptor, but it is only a change of client, not a real disruptor of email. However, mobile + instant short form messaging apps together may continue to eat into email’s dominance.

In the weeks since mapping Yahoo! Mail via POP3 and using Gmail, I’ve found the transition to be quite easy. It only took a day or two to adjust to tags. I was already using multiple Google Calendar accounts as one for three years, but now I’m not losing social invites from friends and family which wouldn’t open in Yahoo! Calendar and got stranded in my inbox. Arguably, Yahoo! Mail and Calendar could have accomplished the same thing as Google. They have a large install base, but lack of enterprise focus, strong Gmail adoption trends among Gen X, Gen Y, and Millennials, and lack of multi-user calendar visibility left them behind. I’d still like to see Google and other calendar vendors support seamless interoperability to the extent that it no longer matters what product another user is sending me a calendar invite from. Ultimately as a personal and work email and calendar consumer, product integration and platform matter which is why I decided to transition fully to Google.

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.