It seems a similar fate has befallen SharePoint, though Microsoft would have us believe otherwise. Back when I was deeply nestled in the dragon's anus, SharePoint was heralded as the future of everything relating to business communications. The problem was the complexity, among other things. But once you had the resources, time and understanding to "properly" implement an enterprise-wide SharePoint solution, well it's not that far of a leap to grow your own service oriented architecture that does everything else in the universe your business may want.
I'm personally not a fan of gmail's layout. In fact the response thread organization is still confusing to me, even though I can easily see how it's laid out. This was an original inspiration that Google had when they created Wave: that if digital communication was designed today it would look different than standard emails. But I thought the cost savings incentive with Wave would price it into the global domination market that Microsoft targeted with SharePoint, probably because I assumed this market existed. Shows ya what anecdotal evidence can do. But perhaps the gear-head ideas about how people all
want to communicate are more a reflection of their own propellers than our desires
