Hell, I bet there are insiders who were surprised about the decision to close up shop on Google Inbox. There's no guarantee that Cloud and Domains will never be closed, but that's on the level of RIM no longer making Blackberries. Google's a modern Internet company and has bet, and bet big, on being a leading cloud services provider, and Domains are a key component to having a vertically integrated offering.
Google is a public company and as such they are required to release certain information in annual report, so their investment in the cloud is verifiable.
> Hell, I bet there are insiders who were surprised about the decision to close up shop on Google Inbox.
Not an insider, but TBH, I was always pretty much sure that one of Gmail or Inbox will go away soon. With Gmail having more user base, it was natural for Inbox to be subsumed by gmail.
Inbox was not really fundamentally different from Gmail. It offered some new features, but I can't imagine that it would be too hard to implement them in Gmail too (e.g., snooze feature).
I suspect Inbox was never meant to survive. It had small details that prevented mass adoption. For instance, it took them months after launch to implement an automatic signature, and then they added the artificial restriction to only allow them in your gmail.com account, not other accounts like in gmail. This prevented a lot of people whose workplace policy requires a specific signature, me included, from completely ditching gmail.
That article mentions that bundles are supposed to arrive in Gmail soon. My point still stands that Inbox features would be not-so-difficult to add to Gmail.
It's much easier than developing and maintaining 2 apps, and testing them on variety of platforms (Web, ios, android etc.) and device/browser combinations.
Google is a public company and as such they are required to release certain information in annual report, so their investment in the cloud is verifiable.