Four years after the launch of G Suite, Google is updating its productivity and collaboration app portfolio with new features, branding and a premium business payment plan.
Google’s G Suite is getting a new name — Workspace — as the company looks to position the software as a hub for remote teamwork and tolls out several feature upgrades and a new payment tier. Workspace includes a variety of apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet and others. As of April, Google Workspace had 6 million paid business customers. That was same month the company claimed to be adding 3 million new individual users to its Meet video platform daily as a result of the pandemic-led rise in home working. The rebranding of the four-year-old G Suite follows Google’s recent moves to unify its various productivity and communication apps into a single integrated interface for email, chat, video, voice and content management. The new interface, announced in July, is now generally available to paid Workspace customers, and will be rolled out to consumer and education uses in the “coming months,” Google said. “The rebranding marks a milestone reflecting how Google has streamlined its portfolio over the past two years, bringing together products that were previously loosely integrated into a tightly unified suite,” said Raul Castanon, senior analyst at 451 Research / S&P Global Market Intelligence.
