What Google's rebranding to Workspace can tell us about the future of work
Earlier today google announced their rebranding of G Suite to Google Workspace. On the surface, that can seem like a run of the mill “let’s try something new” move, but does it actually show signs of something big happening?
Applications assemble!
There has been a trend over the last decade of taking your applications and bundling them together into a ‘suite’ of products and services. Adobe bundled Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere etc into Creative Suite. Microsoft turned Word, Excel and Powerpoint into the Office Suite. Some companies call them hubs, some collections, but as William Shakespheare would have said: “A rose, by any other name would smell as sweet”.
This seems to be a brilliant business opportunity, since you are able to show much more value, and make it easier to justify recurring business models, which has been the leading pricing model for these suites. At the same time, it makes it easier to justify budget-wise, as buying software is no longer a capital expense, but a monthly fee. Everyone wins!
Launching new products becomes easier
If you have your customers already subscribing to a suite of software, it is easy to just include something else in there. This is great if you are developing smaller applications that would be hard to market and sell on their own, but they add a lot of value to the suite. And if it turns out that it does not, you can take it out again, as long as you keep your tent-pole applications. This has meant that we have seen a lot of new features being integrated into both Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and of course, the suite formerly known as G Suite. Again, everyone wins!
But why Workspace?
What does this change of name mean… well, it could very well be that with our new way of working from home, companies are beginning to realise that the tools do not make the woman. We have to learn that real value is the worker, not the application, and we cannot get in the way of the work getting done. But alas, no application suite can replace the worker (yet?), so what if we give the worker a nice and comfortable place to actually carry out the work? In this nirvana that can be accessed from the home office or in the actual office, people have access to everything they could dream of. They can collaborate with their colleagues, who they are no longer seeing at lunch or at the desk across from them every day, with no friction, and no technical difficulties. Pop up a Meet meeting and see them face to face, or collaborate with them in realtime, in a shared document. No problem. We provide you with the PLACE… of course the tools are there too, but in reality they are ubiquitous.
The future if work
There is no doubt that Google is one of the best companies at using data in the world, so whenever they do something like this, we have to stop and think… “what are they seeing?”
One thing that comes to mind is that a lot of work is becoming knowledge work, not tool wrangling. Anyone can learn to operate a spreadsheet, buy some ads, type a few paragraphs, move some files etc. But that is no longer the value of the work, and with automation coming at us at an almost alarming pace, it will prove to be the case even more.
As shocking as it sounds, it seems that software and tools in general are getting out of our way, and aiming at allowing us to work, instead of wrangle. To properly enable this, the idea of taking the position of Workspace, instead of Suite, makes a lot of sense. Sharing and collaborating with each other is a human interaction, not a software feature.
So what is really in a name
Confusion is inevitable with Google releasing Workspace, and Facebook pushing their Workplace. It’s almost just a typo, getting to one or the other. But if you want to take a psychological, rhetorical approach to looking at it, a ‘place’ is a physical location, like going to the office, even if it is a home office. A ‘space’ on the other hand, is something that revolves around the person, which is softer and more comfortable.
It is entirely possible that that was not taken into consideration from neither Facebook or Google, but it could also be a subtle hint.
What it all tells us
To wrap up, the rebranding of G Suite to Google Workspace could very well be a step in the direction of focusing on getting out of the way of the work and creativity that humans bring, and just making sure that they have a place to this from. There is no doubt that Google has seen that the current pandemic state of the world will be something that will affect us for a long time, and that it has accelerated a lot of things in the workplace (sorry) by several years. Software, suites and platforms needs to get out of our way, and let us collaborate and share with each other with no limitations or technical difficulties.
