It's weird how you blame them for slowing innovation, but you admit Email hadn't been fixed or improved for years, and Gmail was a step-change improvement in access to email, cost, storage, spam filtering, and filter management.<p>And despite your claims that they about gmail, Gmail is still using SMTP and MIME, it's still using the same transports, headers, and RFCs that most email clients are designed for. Yes, they've added additional content types you can display and you can write "add-ons", but that's not any different than what native desktop clients did before in terms of what built-in media types they handled vs external plugins.<p>The real impediment to slowing innovation in mail, is the same impediment we see in TCP/IP, or BGP -- a huge legacy deployment makes upgrading any of the formats or protocols quite difficult. Around the time Blackberry was killing it at mobile email ("Crackberry"), about 3 years before the iPhone, I worked on the IETF IMAP Lemonade group which was trying to add push-email notification capability to IMAP so that it could operate efficiently on mobile, work like the Blackberry, scale well, etc. Suffice it to say, trying to get a dozen MUA and MTA vendors onboard for any improvements was difficult.<p>The real innovation slowdown came from the protocol being widely deployed.<p>How do you measure innovation anyway? Did Inbox (I know, I know) count as innovation, automatically picking out trips, assembling itineraries, delivery notices, bills, tasks, forums, newsletters, et al, into bundles, and making them easy to peruse as entities?<p>Do you count incremental improvements as innovation, or only radical 'step-changes' like the iPhone? because those kind of shocking new products happen only once or twice in a lifetime, and I don't think they are affected by the presence of dominant players. We've seen dominant players get disrupted time and time again by step-changes.<p>Or are you claiming incremental innovation has slowed? But if so, how do you categorize it? I mean, I pointed out in Techcrunch years ago (see <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/25/sugar-water/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/25/sugar-water/</a>) , that the vast majority of 'innovative' SV startups ship toys and amusements, not things that radically improvement productivity or health.<p>I think the real innovation to come isn't in improving more toy apps for photos or selfies, or messaging, but in human health, education, and well being.