Google is rebranding G Suite, its family of online productivity and collaboration tools like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Meet. G Suite will now be called Google Workspace, a name that the company has hinted at earlier. Apart from a rebranding of the whole G Suite, Google has also introduced new logos for all the productivity apps included within the Google Workspace, which are used by more than 6 million businesses across the world. Apart from the rebranding, Google also stressed on its ambitions of creating a more integrated family of productive tools and apps, and introduced some new features for Google Workspace.
G Suite as a brand for Google’s paid services was launched in 2016. Google said that the rebranding is done to make all the products feel like they’re more integrated to each other. Apart from the rebranding, Google also changed its pricing tiers by adding a new “Business Plus” plan with more device management features like spawning a new document straight inside a Chat window for all members of a group. In Google Docs, Google has added the ability to initiate a video call for everybody who is viewing a document at the same time. Javier Soltero, Google’s VP and GM for the erstwhile G Suite (now Google Workspace) Javier Soltero said during a press briefing that the company wanted to ensure that the service people use is the same thing people buy. “This is the end of the Office as we know it,” Soltero said referring to Google taking the challenge up to Microsoft.
Google has been making minor integrations ahead of the final rebranding since quite a while. The company had integrated Google Meet with Gmail earlier this year. Now, however, it is hoping to draw in more users with the convenience of fully integrated services that don’t need to be opened separately. Some of the integration has already been rolled out by Google. Google Workspace apps will now also let users bring up small previews of other documents embedded within the tool they’re working on.
Features like creating a doc directly from the chat window or starting a video call directly from Docs will be rolled out in the coming weeks, Google said. Non-business users will get the updated features and changes a little later than businesses.
Coming to the new icons, Gmail getting a new icon is a huge deal. The legendary red ‘M’ on a white envelope will no more be identified with Gmail, something that the company might face criticism for. The new Gmail logo is simply an ‘M’ made out of Google’s core colours – blue, green, yellow, and red.
Apart from Gmail, Google Calendar’s icon is also getting a complete refresh. The new icon is not the blue calendar leaf with the date anymore. Calendar also get the ‘Google’ treatment with the date now coming in the middle of a ‘Google-colour’ calendar leaf outline. Google Docs has also been given the same treatment, while Google Drive icon keeps the same shape but carry’s Google’s theme colours now.
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