> It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier?
Actually, its to make machine-parsing of meaning easier so that information can be extracted from email and presented through other UIs (particularly, Google Search and Google Now.) Surfacing and facilitating responses to calls-to-action in the Gmail UI is important, but the big motivation is, I think, found in the two pages in the "Cross Google Experience" section of the documentation for the Schemas in Gmail feature [1][2].
Actually, its to make machine-parsing of meaning easier so that information can be extracted from email and presented through other UIs (particularly, Google Search and Google Now.) Surfacing and facilitating responses to calls-to-action in the Gmail UI is important, but the big motivation is, I think, found in the two pages in the "Cross Google Experience" section of the documentation for the Schemas in Gmail feature [1][2].
[1] Answers in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search [2] Google Now: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now