Google introduces Workspace to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams

• Google is playing catch-up with Slack and Microsoft Teams, with the pandemic introducing a new degree of urgency.

• Added functionality will enable people to generate documents within Chat – Google’s Slack challenger – without the frustration of switching tabs.

• Homeworkers will also be able to hold video conferences, collaborating on documents, sheets and slides within the same window, building a more homogenous user experience.

• Users will also gain the ability to preview links within documents by simply hovering over the relevant text with their mouse.

• The first to benefit from the improvements will be paying business customers, with the functionality then rolled out to all customers over the coming months.

Catering to a future workforce

• Giving voice to the updates, Javier Soltero of Google Workspace said: “For many of us, work is no longer a physical place we go to, and interactions that used to take place in person are being rapidly digitized.“

• Soltero sees a world in which office workers have turned their homes into workspaces while frontline workers turn to their phones, necessitating a fundamental rethink of how Google should serve them.

• Google Workspace comes against a backdrop of heightened competition in cloud services, with Google going head-to-head with established providers such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft’s Azure with Google Cloud.

• The internet giant is also seeking to claim an increased share of the remote working market by challenging the likes of Slack, Zoom and Teams.

• As office culture fades from memory, providers of remote working solutions are scrabbling to fulfil capability demands of former office workers now scattered to the four winds.