Three billion people now use Google's Workspace apps every month, the company announced on Monday, making Gmail and the Google Calendar/Docs/Slides/Meet suite among the most popular apps on the internet. "It's a crazy number," said Javier Soltero, Google's VP of Workspace. "There's a lot of products you can use to communicate and collaborate with people, right?"
For its next act, Google is looking to win in messaging. Because without it, you can't win the future of work.
The new Google Chat is coming to all Workspace users, the company announced, meaning anyone with a Google account will soon be able to use it. Within Chat, there's a new feature called Spaces (an evolution of a feature previously called Rooms), which acts as a more durable, project-based tool for keeping track of files and tasks across groups of people. "There's a time and a place for email," said Sanaz Ahari, Google's senior director for communication products. "There's a time and a place for chat. Now we recognize that we need a more permanent real-time collaboration canvas — that's Spaces."
Google's also making it easier for individuals to get the full Workspace experience, offering an individual subscription that doesn't require buying a domain or running an administrative console. And for bigger enterprises, it's also offering a more secure, encrypted system that means even Google can't see the data being created in Google apps. In the midst of a time of change and upheaval for so many businesses, Google is trying hard to position itself as the obvious choice for productivity tools. And it knows that in a remote and hybrid world, productivity starts with communication.
Historically speaking, Google's messaging strategy has been somewhere between chaotic and totally incoherent. The original version of Google Chat eventually turned into Hangouts, before Hangouts was split into multiple products, Google Voice became a somewhat competitive thing, Google Fi showed up to compete with both, and at various times Google Wave and Buzz and Allo all made a run at messaging supremacy. (Didn't work.) When it comes to video, Meet and Duo both still exist, and Hangouts can do video calls. Google Messages has become a success as the go-to Android texting app, but Google has even tinkered with that to the point of confusion while trying to bring standards like RCS into play. In general, Google seems unable to make up its mind about how messaging is supposed to work.
While Google has struggled to solve this problem, others have done much better. Microsoft has quickly begun to build its entire Microsoft 365 suite around Teams, realizing that in a world of remote and hybrid work, a chat app is actually the closest available analog to the office itself. Salesforce bought Slack, and Marc Benioff said the company is rebuilding "all our technology, once again, to become Slack-first." Google, which was years ahead of the industry in thinking about work as web-based and collaborative by default, suddenly risks being left behind because it can't figure out chat.
Google readily acknowledges that it needs a coherent strategy. And at least for the moment, it seems to have one. It starts with Gmail, which is now both an email client and something of a Google-wide communication hub. Users can have Meet calls, respond to Chat messages, work in topic-focused Spaces and, of course, send email all from a single place. Because it's all unified under a single Google account, with a single system for setting status and getting notifications, Google's hoping that at the very least users will have to spend less time thinking about how many products Google has.
The tricky part for Google, Ahari said, is offering everything without being overly prescriptive. "We're not here to dictate what's the best way to collaborate," she said. "We're more of the belief that collaboration happens across these mediums. And we want to make it easy for everyone to choose the best medium for them." The team seems to see communication as a spectrum of timeliness and permanence: Email is permanent but not timely, Meet and Chat are timely but not permanent, Spaces is both timely and permanent. But every company, every team, is different, so Google sees its job as simply providing all the options in one place.
Spaces is Google's way of creating permanent, searchable chat a la Slack or Teams, but it exists inside of Gmail and Google Chat.Image: Google
That kind of flexibility is a running theme for the new era of Workspace. In an effort to make meetings more equitable for everyone, for instance, Google built a companion app for Meet so that everyone, even in the conference room, can participate in polls or share their video. It now offers a Workspace-wide status system that lets people quickly mark where they are and whether they're available. And Google's even opening up more access to third-party apps and integrations. "It's fine for people to have the habits they have," Soltero said. "We just have to kind of nudge them along … there's an elegance to doing this that actually connects them to the things Google is great at."
Google has been working on all this integration for the last year or so, as it takes Workspace from a collection of apps to a more unified, singular canvas. Users can work on spreadsheets inside of Gmail, or have Meet calls in the same tab as their slide deck. The most common criticism of the new-look Workspace is just that it's too many options, too many buttons, too much in one place. Google agrees. "I think one of the very first conversations we had when I joined," Ahari said, "was about the clutter." On a normal-sized laptop screen, there was just too much going on to be able to fully engage in any one thing. Ahari and her team focused on making it easy to quickly jump between things without making the interface overwhelming, and moving notifications out to the corner where they don't get in the way.
In general, Google faces the same broad challenge as every company making workplace software, which is that nobody knows anything. Soltero and Ahari both acknowledged that they don't know exactly how the future of work will work, and that there are likely to be a huge number of different ideas and experiments in the coming months both within Google and among its billions of users. Google, like so many others, is trying to make its tools simultaneously functional and flexible, able to adapt to every variation of hybrid and remote work without devolving into overwhelming chaos.
Few companies have a larger opportunity or responsibility in this space, though. Three billion users gives you a lot of sway over the future of just about anything. Soltero said he's spending his time thinking about access, security and making sure the future of work is both available for and optimized for everyone, no matter their situation. He has always said that one of the reasons he joined Google after a stint at Microsoft was because Google was so far ahead on helping people collaborate. With communication, he's playing catch-up. But he and Ahari seem to like their chances.
