Happy birthday, Gmail! According to the Verve, you are 20 years old! The big two-oh! Sure, you had some growing pains at first. And then there was the whole period when you and your users felt snobbish about their gmail accounts and looked down on people with yahoo accounts. But that’s all water under the bridge. We’re all old now.
Google is notorious for killing off services, but it is inconceivable they’ll ever kill off you, Gmail. I expect you and your users will be around for a long long time. Heck even an old yahoo email account user like me uses Gmail from time to time. There’s no guarantees, of course, but I expect to be revisiting this post in 2034, god willing, and writing about your 30th. Until then…
Smart People I Know 
I’m reflecting on my own email evolution: AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail…then, well, that’s been it for some time. Will there be a next email thing to replace Gmail? Side note: I know people who still use their AOL email as a primary account.
I imagine we will always have email of some sort, but I expect it to get folded into something with more of a chat function. But who knows? Email has been around since the beginning of Unix and I was using IBM’s PROFS email in the early 80s. So perhaps we will always have email.
Yeah, I also expect email will stay with us in some form or another. Probably in some kind of integrated environment like Microsoft is trying to do with Teams.