Google announced on Tuesday that it was rebranding GSuite, its line of productivity apps for business customers. The services are now referred to as Google Workspace.
The rebranding comes as Google puts greater effort into promoting its cloud services to businesses and promoting enterprise versions of apps like Docs, Sheets, and Drive. Google has been trying to expand its cloud business to find more ways to make money outside of search and advertising. Google said its workspace suite now has 2.6 billion monthly users.
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In addition to the new name, Google introduced some new functions on Tuesday. Users can now preview the links they'll add to their files instead of clicking through. Google software also suggests actions when a person mentions "@" an employee, e.g. B. assign a task or share a document with them. Google is also expanding the picture-in-picture video calling tools in Meet, the company's teleconferencing software that rivals Zoom.
For consumers, the changes are noteworthy as Google often introduces new features in the business-oriented versions of its software services before they are further rolled out.
The announcement comes because office life for many companies has come to a standstill due to COVID-19 and has prompted employees to swap company premises for home offices. At Google, most employees are expected to work remotely by at least July 2021.
"We welcome the fact that work is no longer necessarily a physical place we go," said Javier Soltero, head of Google Workspace, during a press conference on Monday. "The work will be everywhere in between and the offices will take on a different role."
However, the company announced it started working on the new features last year, and the rebranding was not fueled by the new focus on remote working sparked by the pandemic. However, working from home has been a boon to Google's services. In April, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said the use of Meet had increased. He said the service added 3 million new users a day during the pandemic, up from 2 million new users a day a few weeks earlier.
In July, the company announced a major redesign of Gmail to turn the app into a hub for planning projects and chatting with colleagues, beyond an email service. The update puts Gmail in more direct competition with other productivity apps from competitors like Slack and Microsoft that have a product called Teams.