With Google’s G Suite representing their major product for workplace productivity, it is one of Google’s most critical product offerings in that it actually creates direct revenue. Today Google has launched the first major revamp of the service since it launched: say hello to Google Workspace.
Calling this a rebrand with a slap of new colours isn’t completely fair, Google has brought new pricing tears, new features and a deeper link to collaboration to the suite, sorry, Workspace. For those not using Google’s paid offerings, Google has promised to bring enhancements to Google for Education and consumers.
Within the updated offerings Google has widened their branding colours to more apps with Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Google Docs/Sheets/ presentations and Meet all getting the four colour treatment. Check out the updated icons below.
Overall G Suite was ready for a rebrand from at least a design and iconography perspective, hopefully, the other updates and continued development will be beneficial to users. I know there’s one thing that paid users would love, and that’s their Workspace accounts to be granted the same features as free Google accounts when it comes to all of Google’s wider services.
Here is the funny thing. Our work uses G Suite (Sorry Workspace) and we use Google Meet quite extensively for customer meetings. Had a VC with a customer the other day who does not use Workspace so using the free version. He was able to bur his background whilst paying customer (i.e. me) wasn’t able to do so. I hope this update provides that functionality.
There are a lot of things people cannot do with Google’s paid offering. They say it is to protect businesses but a lot of people got into “Google Apps for your Domain” for their personal domains that are still currently Grandfathered and with restrictions. I personally wish Google would put the relevant options in the control panel with those options being defaulted to off. At least having the option to turn on features as you have mentioned as well as Google Play Public Reviews, Google Assistant Reminders, Play Pass, Family Sharing, Linking Family to Google Home, YouTube Family membership, amongst… Read more »
The issues I encountered with the paid suite in terms of wider access to the google ecosystem (assistant etc) made me move. Just became to annoying.