In 2006, when Google announced an online mini-suite called Docs & Spreadsheets, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington declared it to be a “shot across the bow of Microsoft Office.” It certainly looked like one. But over the subsequent dozen years, as Docs & Spreadsheets evolved into Google Apps—which was rebranded as G Suite in 2016–Microsoft’s decades-old suite proved to be less vulnerable to attack than you might have guessed. Today, Office continues to dominate workplace productivity and Office 365, its subscription version, is a growth business; revenue from business customers was up 38 percent last quarter.
Meanwhile, Google’s suite has racked up plenty of users, especially among consumers, students, and small businesses, without ever threatening Office’s hold on larger organizations. But Google hasn’t given up on the big-company market. Three years ago, it hired VMware cofounder Diane Greene to run its enterprise operation. Under the new name Google Cloud, her domain now includes an array of formerly disparate business-y efforts, including G Suite.
Google says that more than four million organizations are paying G Suite customers, up from two million a couple of years ago; some of the marquee names are Airbus, Carrefour, Colgate-Palmolive, Nielsen, Verizon, and Whirlpool. The Office hegemony is still largely in place–Google and Microsoft share different stats about their suite businesses with little overlap, which makes precise comparisons difficult–but G Suite is making progress on its own terms.
With the Google Cloud Next event currently going on in San Francisco, it’s the biggest week of the year for G Suite announcements. Last week, before the conference began, I spoke with two of the people responsible for G Suite–VP of apps Prabhakar Raghavan and VP of engineering Elissa Murphy–about some of that news and the state of G Suite in general.
The big picture
How has Google managed to double G Suite’s base of paying customers? Being part of Google Cloud, which is heavily invested in signing up business customers for web services of all sorts, has helped: “It’s very fair to say that the amount of cross-fertilization and cross-selling is dramatically higher than it was three years ago,” says Raghavan. So has the effort the company has put into simplifying mass migrations, he adds: “We’re doing lots of things to make it super easy for large accounts to move onto us and get their workforces running with G Suite.”
Lastly, Google’s productivity apps have been around long enough that a generation of young people entering the workforce grew up on them, not Office. One customer, Raghavan says, recently told him that “last year I hired 3,000 people and they all want G Suite.”
A new Gmail … when companies are ready for it
When Google unveiled a meaty Gmail upgrade in April, much of what was new aimed to make the email service more palatable for corporate use, including additional measures designed to prevent employees from getting phished and features for sending confidential messages that can’t be forwarded or printed out. But instead of immediately rolling the new version out to business customers, Google offered it only as an option for companies who’d signed up for G Suite’s early-adopter program. Today, it’s making the new version available to all businesses–but still giving them the choice to turn it on or leave it off for now. (Some of the functionality announced in April is still in the process of being rolled out.)
Though Google is being careful to ensure that corporate types don’t feel like they’re being forced into a major Gmail transition on Google’s schedule rather than their own, reaction to the interface tweaks and other changes has been positive, according to Raghavan. “We were terrified that moving a single pixel would result in a Twitter storm,” he says. “Every indication so far has been that’s not the case.”
Along with the additional security capabilities and other stuff straightforwardly designed to please the people who make purchasing decisions for big companies, the new Gmail has some more out-there additions, including Smart Compose, which uses AI to try to complete to complete your thoughts as you type a message. My colleague Mark Wilson tried the technology and found it better at “meaningless conversations” than “serious topics,” an assessment which doesn’t seem out of whack with how Murphy uses the feature–she explains that she concentrates on the middle of her emails and accepts help from Smart Compose for “the fluff at the top and the fluff at the bottom.” (In addition, Smart Reply, which originated in Gmail, is coming to Google Hangouts’ chat feature.)
Security investigations made easier
Google Voice writ large
In an announcement I would not have anticipated, Google is unveiling an enterprise edition of Google Voice, its venerable (though sometimes neglected) consumer-oriented service which gives you a phone number which isn’t tied to a particular phone. Initially available to members of the G Suite early adopter program–with eventual pricing TBD–the new version will let businesses manage numbers in bulk, port in existing numbers, and create routing trees. It’ll also be integrated with its G Suite mates: “If somebody is out of the office and known to be so because of their calendar, we can ring through to a backup person,” says Raghavan.
The company has been testing Google Voice’s new business incarnation since last fall. “We thought we should start with smaller businesses, but we actually found fairly big companies demanding it pretty hard.” Raghavan says.
Translation into correct English
Members of G Suite’s early-adopter program are getting a grammar-checking feature built into the Docs word processor–which, at first blush, might sound like catch-up with the one already built into Microsoft Word or an alternative to using Grammarly. (Last year, Microsoft also gave Word AI-infused features designed to help users avoid linguistic faux pas such as passive phrasing and repetitive wording.) Raghavan says that Google’s new feature is different than existing ones because it leverages the company’s long experience in automated language translation: “Our grammar correction takes incorrect English and translates it to correct English. It’s not a brittle rules-based approach, where you have to throw humans at it to maintain it.”
Raghavan says that the grammar tool grew out of Google’s thinking about the Google Assistant and how to extend its spirit of AI-powered helpfulness to a business context. Simply offering a Google Home-type smart speaker optimized for work scenarios would satisfy “a very narrow use case” compared to providing the G Suite apps with more intelligence, he says.
More wide-ranging search
In February 2017, Google introduced Cloud Search, a service that let workers find documents and coworkers while also giving companies control over which information isn’t shared. Now it’s giving this search engine the ability to retrieve information stored in non-Google repositories, including ones which companies might host on their own servers, such as in Microsoft’s SharePoint. The goal is to make a company’s internal search as easy as, well, Googling something: “Previously folks would have to tune their enterprise index on their own, which was pretty laborious,” says Murphy.
À la carte storage
The fact that businesses are interested in searching SharePoint using Google’s engine indicates that even companies which are intrigued by aspects of Google’s sales pitch don’t necessarily want to toss out their Microsoft products in a single epoch-shifting move. That reality is also reflected in Google’s decision to begin unbundling G Suite’s Drive online storage into Drive Enterprise, a standalone service which companies can pay for if they’re not interested in the other components.
The goal, of course, is to get such companies interested in everything G Suite offers. As Murphy says, “We’re hoping to give folks the flexibility to buy that if that’s what they want, and then eventually graduate up to the full suite.”