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

[mareksotak]

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?

[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.

[mareksotak → akagusu]

I get the revenue point, but it doesn’t entirely feel that way from the outside. Google does try to sell Workspace as a coherent, modern collaboration suite, yet some of the decisions make it look like the product direction isn’t really thought through end-to-end.

What adds to the confusion is how often Google seems to re-surface or re-announce features that have been in Workspace for years, even though they’re not really polished for what teams need today or anywhere near on par with the competition. The recent “shared inbox” announcement is a good example: it’s basically mailbox delegation with a new coat of paint, but still not viable for real shared workflows.

And I keep seeing comments from people saying things like: “We’re looking for this feature so we can finally move off Microsoft 365.”

So there is demand. And not just for this feature alone. There are multiple areas where users clearly want functionality that keeps them inside Workspace instead of pushing them toward third-party tools or competitors’ ecosystems.

[akagusu → mareksotak]

Google is in a position where it doesn't need to offer good products; an ok-ish product is more than enough to keep people using it and the "re-announce features" is the marketing part that keep people signing up for the service; once they have signed their data is trapped and they will keeping using the product not because the product is good, but because it is so hard to leave.