Decided to think about Helpouts from Google's perspective. I don't see it as a stand-alone monetizable business, put into the market to compete with LiveNinja. Rather, it's a strategic move by Google to strengthen its ecosystem by:

1. Onboarding more people to G+. G+ is Google's attempt to create a single social identity for each person across all Google products, thus uniting what can seem like a fragmented Google experience. Having Helpouts (using Google Hangouts) is one way to drive new users for G+ through a specific use case.

2. Developing real-time results for help in Google Search. Imagine what will happen when a user searches "math tutoring today" - Google can offer real-time suggestions from Helpouts using Universal Search and Knowledge Graph.

3. Driving new business accounts on Google Apps & Google Analytics, plus sell more ads. When Google encourages skilled people to create Helpouts, they are basically increasing the number of enterprise customers they can potentially recruit for Apps, Analytics, and oh yeah - search / display ads.

And a random idea:

4. Using recorded Hangouts and posting them into a new category on Youtube. Could increase the overall quality of instruction. Also Youtube could be a great way to source Helpout teachers.

If Google chooses to achieve scale - by integrating with search most likely - it will be difficult for LiveNinja to compete on a broad scale. As previous posts mention, a niche / targeted approach may work better for LN to secure loyal users and deter drop off to Helpouts.

Great point, thinking of it that way gives some insight into why Google may have changed the UI.

The insight being is that Google is now discarding the professional crowd who bought into their Apps for ADD teenagers. Time to look for alternatives.

Google Apps generates less than 3% of Google's revenues. (Probably much less.)

Thus, not enough of a money-maker to influence the direction of Gmail.

Browsing email while composing isn't part of my workflow. Definitely makes sense as a use case, a few others mentioned it as well.

Agreed, for short emails (setting up mtgs, quick reviews) it works fine for the most part.

Personal preference wise - I feel more comfortable sending email when I'm able to see CC/BCC, text formatting, & attachments. Understand that not everyone feels the same way.

Makes sense. I do like it for casual mail - e.g., if I'm setting up a quick time to meet an advisor. But for more important things, it doesn't work well for me.

I am checking out Airmail thanks to an older HN thread. Cheers!

Writing concise, properly formatted email is the responsibility of the writer, no matter the email client UI.

It's also my responsibility to ensure I can focus and work efficiently, agreed. Whether I can do that well with Gmail's new Compose is the issue.

Thanks, checked it out. Impressed that Jason takes the time to respond to many of the tweets.

Oh, wow! This is pretty beautiful. Thank you.

Clicking "-><-" brings me to a small chat-like box for my email. Agreed though, I like large boxes for email.

Yep, just found this out from another comment. Thanks!

Yeah I'm kinda OCD about my email.

Thanks, just found the HN thread about email clients. Checking out Airmail now.

Perhaps the anxiety is because there was a change, and not specifically this change?

I started using eM Client as a native desktop email app because of the new gMail reply feature. Feature-wise it does everything I expect/want for email.

It drives me absolutely insane when a company makes an 'enhancement' and reduces usable window space. If I am writing a long email I want to be able to use the maximum amount of window space and not be crammed into something that is 25% of my monitor size.

Link to the HN thread with email clients?