The Gmail engineering team is perhaps 500 strong based on various estimates that try to exclude team members who work on Google Workspace more broadly. At Google’s median pay of $300K, the cost is very approximately $150M/yr to engineer the stuff that makes Gmail work. That’s before accounting for infrastructure specifically required for engineering efforts, such as training models.
Let’s speculate that migrating to a whole new email standard would eat up 10% of the team for a couple of years, giving time to build and adapt a software stack that can run at Google scale on the new standard. That’s a $30M spend.
While this figure is peanuts for Google, consider that during the span of time that engineers would be transitioning to “email 2.0,” the full Gmail team would continue to work on just maintaining “email 1.0” and adapting all the new standards that continue to make the existing system improve.
Why would anyone at Google want this disruption unless email 1.0 was so broken that it was hopeless?
From the article, the new software stack is just a slight modification of the existing stack. I just don't see how it would take a few years and 10% of the workforce to add a few new steps to the existing pipeline.
Once implemented in some open source mail agents, everyone can just upgrade on their usual schedule, so it's not like every single person needs to spend millions of dollars to transition.
Let’s speculate that migrating to a whole new email standard would eat up 10% of the team for a couple of years, giving time to build and adapt a software stack that can run at Google scale on the new standard. That’s a $30M spend.
While this figure is peanuts for Google, consider that during the span of time that engineers would be transitioning to “email 2.0,” the full Gmail team would continue to work on just maintaining “email 1.0” and adapting all the new standards that continue to make the existing system improve.
Why would anyone at Google want this disruption unless email 1.0 was so broken that it was hopeless?