Gmail’s March to World Domination: The Platform Strategy

Gmail plus Chrome Gmail is an app eco-system that has snuck up on me. I now can’t use Gmail without:

  • Assistant.io – An amazing little meeting scheduling app.
  • Boomerang – An app that lets me schedule emails to be sent later or returned to my inbox as a reminder.
  • Rapportive – Lets me see info on the people I’m emailling.
  • Relate IQ – Lets me update our CRM from within the email.

And thats not even getting to the useful Chrome extensions:

  • Honey Badger – A great tool to learn about the traffic and funding of a website.
  • Evernote – I use the web clipping to make articles easier to read even if I don’t plan to save them.
  • Ghostery – Tells me what cookies are being used to track me on a given page.
  • LastPass – Secure passwords, nuff said.
  • BufferApp – Allows me to schedule my social media posts.

Gmail is slowly building a platform that will be very difficult to migrate away from. I’m sure others said the same about Outlook in the past, but cloud platforms seem more powerful than their desktop ancestors since they so easily build upon the services provided by others.

1 comment

  1. LastPass is totally one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” ideas… DOH.

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