Although he has many fair points, jumping to the assumption that Google would shut down gmail doesn't seem to be very careful. He is talking about why Google wa

Although he has many fair points, jumping to the assumption that Google would shut down gmail doesn't seem to be very careful. He is talking about why Google wants to kill email and his reasoning is right — too bad not everyone understands that. But the real question is not if they want, but if they can. Now, can they? It's too complicated for me to say something clearly. They are not the only mail hosting providers and I'm not even sure that gmail is the leading one amongst "common people", that is "your customers". If your customers use email, you will be using email. If you use email, and your colleagues use email then turns out everybody around uses email and your company shall be using email internally too. If your company is using gmail services and gmail shuts down, your admin will be starting your own mail server in a hurry. In that light I would say I'm very much wanting gmail to be shot down, because it means no more excuses to not setting up your own SMTP server. So I believe Google could gently move some part (maybe even major one) of their users to some service of their own, but if it will be far enough from email, being more like "recommended to you" feed, then people eventually will feel the need in service that could "just deliver that fucking message, goddammit!" and Google will lose niche they are leading at in favor of niche where they will be more like competing with Facebook and, probably, losing. If email persists then, they will lose ability to read emails of millions of people basically for nothing. So, no, I don't believe they will shut down gmail. Not as long as email exists at all.