Microsoft has combined chat and channels in Teams as part of a redesign that will include a new threaded conversation experience.
Channel conversations — currently accessed in the team section — will be moved to chat. The goal is to make it easier for users to view all their messages in one place rather than continuously switching between sections.
“This integrates both chat and channels into your critical workflows, making it easier to access, triage, and organize your conversations,” Jeff Teper, president of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, said in a blog post Monday.
New filters available in Teams can be applied to let users focus on chats, channels, or unread messages.
Among the other changes is a new @mention view to highlight new messages across multiple chats or channels. There’s also a “custom section” where users can keep conversations relating to a project or topic — whether that’s in chat, channels, or with a Teams bot — in a single place.
Teams users will see a “self-service, guided onboarding flow” when the updates are made available in public preview next month, Teper said. This will help introduce users to the new look and allow them to configure it to the way they want to work: those who prefer to keep chat and channels separate can do so, for example, either during the onboarding or at a later stage.
Microsoft will test threaded conversations with customers during this quarter, with an expected roll out in mid-2025.
Microsoft has combined chat and channels in Teams as part of a redesign that will include a new threaded conversation experience.
Channel conversations — currently accessed in the team section — will be moved to chat. The goal is to make it easier for users to view all their messages in one place rather than continuously switching between sections.
“This integrates both chat and channels into your critical workflows, making it easier to access, triage, and organize your conversations,” Jeff Teper, president of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, said in a blog post Monday.
New filters available in Teams can be applied to let users focus on chats, channels, or unread messages.
Among the other changes is a new @mention view to highlight new messages across multiple chats or channels. There’s also a “custom section” where users can keep conversations relating to a project or topic — whether that’s in chat, channels, or with a Teams bot — in a single place.
Teams users will see a “self-service, guided onboarding flow” when the updates are made available in public preview next month, Teper said. This will help introduce users to the new look and allow them to configure it to the way they want to work: those who prefer to keep chat and channels separate can do so, for example, either during the onboarding or at a later stage.
Microsoft will test threaded conversations with customers during this quarter, with an expected roll out in mid-2025.
The web has been a mixed blessing for people who care about information. Yes, it’s made it easier than ever to access facts and opinions from around the globe — but it also throws out older data as quickly as it brings in new data. (And let’s not even talk about propaganda!)
One shining beacon for recording truthful and accurate records throughout the web’s history has been the Internet Archive.
When he founded the Archives in 1996, his ambitious goal was to provide “universal access to all knowledge.” Kahle and his friends have been remarkably successful. Today, the Archives holds digital copies of 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, a million software programs, and even a copy of Computerworld from 1969.
To do this, he created the Internet Archive and its associated projects, including the Wayback Machine, which allows users to view archived versions of more than 866 billion saved web pages, and the Open Library project, which aims to create a web page for every published book.
It’s that last project that got the Archives into legal hot water. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kahle opened the library for free ebook borrowing via the Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program. Publishing companies were not amused and the Internet Archive lost the resulting lawsuit, Hachette v. Internet Archive. The court rejected the Archive’s fair use defense, finding that its digital lending practices infringed on publishers’ copyrights.
That’s a huge problem on its own. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a gross revenue in its most recent 990 filing of only $30.5 million. For the size of the job it’s undertaken, it’s grossly underfinanced.
Recently, though, adding insult to injury, the Archive has been subjected to one cyber-attack after another.The first major incident occurred Oct. 9-10 and involved two simultaneous attacks: First, hackers exploited a GitLab token, compromising the Archive’s source code and stealing user data from 31 million accounts. Concurrently, a pro-Palestinian group called SN BlackMeta launched a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, temporarily knocking the site — and the Wayback Machine — offline.
Blackmeta said it hit the site because it belongs to the United States, which supports Israel in the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict. Uhm, no, no it doesn’t. The only cause the Internet Archive espouses is freedom of information, and it has no connection with the US government.
Maybe it should. I could argue that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) should track the public web, but it doesn’t.
Then, on Oct. 20, the Internet Archive suffered yet another security breach: This time, hackers exploited unrotated Zendesk, the help desk support program’s application programming interface (API) tokens, to access the Archive’s support platform.
The results have been one mess after another. Many of the Archive’s services, including the Wayback Machine, have gone dark. In addition, people are worried that some of the data stored by the Archive has been deleted or compromised.
Operators managed to get the site back up, and a few days ago, Kahle told CBC Radio, “It’s just so sad. It’s great to be back up, and we have millions of people now accessing the site again.”
That didn’t last. Since then, it’s been hammered yet again!
Enough already — crashing the Internet Archive won’t make a lick of difference to the world’s geopolitical problems. No one will get rich from ripping off the Internet Archive users. There is no point in messing with the Archive. None!
The Archive is a useful library. That’s it. That’s all. And that’s enough.
In particular, the Archive keeps the only real records of what’s been on the Web. As we put more of our records and news on the Web and nowhere else, that’s vitally important for historians and other people who appreciate knowing who said what to whom and when.
The Archive needs to be preserved, not vandalized. I’m reminded of the dim-minded protestors whose big idea was to throw pumpkin soup on the Mona Lisa. Quick! What were they protesting?
You don’t know, do you?
It was about the right to healthy, sustainable food.
That attack made no difference whatsoever.
Vandalism, whether on a politically neutral, useful website or on world-famous art, is not helpful; it’s only harmful. And, in the Internet Archive’s case, it’s also pointless.
Amidst the mountains of vendor cheerleading for generative AI efforts, often amplified by enterprise board members, skeptical CIOs tend to feel outnumbered. But their cynical worries may now have some company, in the form of a report from Apple and an interview from Meta — both of which raise serious questions about whether genAI can actually do much of what its backers claim.
The debate involves some fairly amorphous terms, at least when spoken in a computing environment context — things like reasoning and logic. When a large language model (LLM), for example, proposes a different and ostensibly better way to do something, is it because its sophisticated algorithm has figured out a better way? Or is it just wildly guessing, and sometimes it gets lucky? Or did it hallucinate something and accidentally say something helpful?
Would a CIO ever trust a human employee with such tendencies? Not likely, but IT leaders are regularly tasked with integrating genAI tools into the enterprise environment by corporate executives expecting miracles.
The conclusions drawn by AI experts from Apple and Meta may help CIOs set more realistic expectations about what genAI models can and cannot do, now and in the near future.
“Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance when responding to different instantiations of the same question. Specifically, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered.
“Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and demonstrate that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases… When we add a single clause that appears relevant to the question, we observe significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the added clause does not contribute to the reasoning chain needed to reach the final answer.”
What does mathematical reasoning have to do with AI-powered business applications? The Apple research team spelled it out:
“Mathematical reasoning is a crucial cognitive skill that supports problem-solving in numerous scientific and practical applications. Consequently, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to effectively perform mathematical reasoning tasks is key to advancing artificial intelligence and its real-world applications.”
What today’s state-of-the-art LLMs do is not logical reasoning, the researchers concluded:
“Current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data… It may resemble sophisticated pattern matching more than true logical reasoning.”
“When a departing OpenAI researcher in May talked up the need to learn how to control ultra-intelligent AI, LeCun pounced. ‘It seems to me that before “urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us,” we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,’ he replied on X.
“He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s ‘frontier’ AIs, including those made by Meta itself.”
Later, the WSJ story lets LeCun make his central point:
“Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.
“‘We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart — but that’s not true,’ says LeCun. ‘You can manipulate language and not be smart, and that’s basically what LLMs are demonstrating.’”
That is the key issue. Enterprises are putting far too much faith in genAI systems, says Francesco Perticarari, general partner at technology investment house Silicon Roundabout Ventures in London, England.
It’s easy to assume that the rare correct answers given by these tools are flashes of brilliance, rather than the genAI having gotten a lucky guess. But “the output is not based at all on reasoning. It is merely based on extremely powerful computing,” Perticarari said.
Putting genAI in the driver’s seat
One frequently cited selling point for genAI is that some models have proven quite effective at passing various state bar exams. But those bar exams are ideal environments for genAI, because the answers are all published. Memorizations and regurgitation are ideal uses for genAI, but that doesn’t mean genAI tools have the skills, understanding, and intuition to practice law.
“The logic is that if genAI can pass the bar exam, it can handle my business, build systems that are robust and that work now,” said Alan Nichol, co-founder and CTO of AI vendor Rasa. “[Business leaders] are taking this dangerous, naive approach and just letting the LLM figure it out,” he said.
Nichol pointed to Apple’s analysis that the more complex and multilayered math problems got, the more the LLMs got lost and confused.
“It’s supposed to understand this math, but something is definitely fishy. The medium through which they are doing [these calculations] is natural language. It’s fuzzy and imprecise,” he said. “Language models were never supposed to do a lot of these things. There are vanishingly few situations where you want your software to guess what it should be doing, what the next few steps should be.”
Nichol stressed that these systems, left to their own devices, are reckless. “Four out of five times, genAI doesn’t follow its own instructions,” he said. “You want it to guess business logic? It just doesn’t work and is extremely slow and consumes a tremendous amount of tokens.”
Perticarari from Silicon Roundabout Ventures is especially concerned about hallucinations coupled with the lack of meaningful guardrails. GenAI seems to easily overcome — or be tricked by a user into overcoming — many of the safeguards organizations attempt to place around it.
“If you have a one-year-old, you wouldn’t give her a loaded gun and then try and explain to her why she shouldn’t shoot you,” Perticarari said. “[GenAI is] not sentient. Humans are sentient and they assume the system is intelligent, too. Letting genAI run on autopilot to me is crazy. Don’t give anything to a black box.”
Fighting FOMO
Perticarari blames enterprise executives and board members for falling victim to countless AI sales pitches. He says that CIOs have to be the voice of sanity.
“It is always easy during a gold rush to sell hype. [Sales execs] just keep delivering endless layers of selling without really understanding,” Perticarari said. “CIOs need to ask, ‘How fundamental and vital is the task that [we] are outsourcing to genAI?’”
Jake Reynolds, the CTO at cybersecurity vendor Wirespeed, agrees. He maintains that a lot of the rush to genAI has been pushed by board members, and “the CIO had to tag along.”
Executives are giving in to FOMO (fear of missing out), thinking that “their largest competitor is doing it, so we are going to do it,” he said. “But it doesn’t deliver. Even with the more objective mathematics, it starts falling apart. Try to get consistency out of it. You can’t. The words it predicts changes every time you tweak a little knob… Are you really OK with your product only working 80% of the time?”
Reynolds encourages CIOs to slow down and be as minimalistic as practical. “We’re not laggards. We’re just realists about what the technology can really do,” he said.
Judicious use of genAI tools can mitigate disappointment or worse, agrees Nichol. “We should just let the LLMs do what the LLMs are amazing at. Don’t let the LLM do everything.”
The US government has announced new rules restricting investments in China’s AI and other tech sectors deemed threats to national security, expanding the existing restrictions that were so far limited to exports.
First introduced by the US Treasury in June, the rules are based on an executive order signed by President Joe Biden in August 2023.
They focus on three critical areas: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain AI systems.
“This narrow set of technologies is core to the next generation of military, cybersecurity, surveillance, and intelligence applications,” the Treasury said in a statement.
The US already restricts or bans the export of many technologies covered by the new rules to certain countries. The new program complements existing export controls and inbound screening measures by blocking US investments from aiding the development of sensitive technologies in countries of concern, the Treasury added.
Fueling the trade war
This marks the latest development in the ongoing trade war between the US and China, which has already witnessed numerous restrictions.
Analysts are skeptical of the policy’s impact, cautioning that it may further intensify tensions and stifle innovation and growth.
“The scope of restrictions is now expanding beyond the sale of technology IP or chips to include investments in the Chinese tech sector,” said Neil Shah, VP of research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “This move aims to stifle Chinese tech companies on both fronts — limiting financial and technology inflows. Unfortunately, this will make it difficult for Chinese companies to innovate quickly and will further intensify the geopolitical tech cold war.”
This also means that if China retaliates — while protecting its own manufacturing ecosystem — it could affect large and small tech companies that still rely on China as a key market.
Restrictions could stifle collaboration and knowledge exchange between nations, potentially slowing innovation by reducing opportunities to work on advanced projects.
“Companies might also need to reassess their strategic priorities, which may lead to an unnecessary increase in innovation costs,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “On the other hand, regulatory concerns will force enterprises outside the US to further prioritize localization strategies to achieve self-sufficiency in critical areas, potentially leading to increasingly isolated innovation ecosystems.”
The new rules may also require US enterprises to closely monitor both domestic and international regulatory shifts and establish agile compliance programs to adapt swiftly to evolving requirements.
“These constraints can also diminish R&D investments and have profound long-term economic effects, stifling advancement in pivotal sectors like semiconductors, quantum computing, and AI, ultimately hampering overall technological progress,” said Thomas George, president of Cybermedia Research.
Opportunity for emerging markets
For other emerging markets, however, the tightened US restrictions could present new opportunities by attracting redirected foreign investments from US firms.
“As trade tensions rise and new regulations emerge, US companies increasingly move away from Chinese manufacturing,” said George. “Instead, they want to collaborate with countries such as India, Mexico, and Vietnam. This shift is crucial as it enhances companies’ resilience and allows them to navigate new US export controls more effectively.”
Companies should reduce dependency on any single country by diversifying supply chains to mitigate risks associated with regulatory changes in specific regions, according to Dai.
“Engaging with research and advisory firms can help them better understand the potential impact of various regulatory changes, prepare contingency plans, and develop strategies to assess and mitigate risks,” Dai said.
The Phoenix fabrication facility of the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker is yielding more usable chips than similar plants in Taiwan, according to the Taipei Times.
Rick Cassidy, president of TSMC’s US division, said during a webinar last week that the share of usable chips from the company’s Phoenix plant exceeds that of similar Taiwanese plants by 4%. If true, the superior performance at the Phoenix fab is notable because the US government has been working to spur a return of the semiconductor manufacturing industry to US shores, where manufacturing tends to be more costly.
Better yields would help offset those higher costs.
“Four percent higher yield is certainly good news,” said Harry Moser, president of the Reshoring Initiative, a non-profit that offers companies assessments on offshoring costs. “To be competitive, we need a higher yield. It is agreed that US factory capital cost and operating cost will be 10% to 20% higher than in most other countries. The 4% will offset some of that difference.”
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted critical gaps in the semiconductor supply chain as imports to the US and other nations ground to a halt, affecting the production of everything with electronics, from smart phones to cars. The CHIPS and Science Act, passed in 2022, earmarked more than $52 billion in funding and tax incentives for use by the US semiconductor industry to create new or expand existing manufacturing and R&D facilities.
The CHIPS Act was created to address both future possible supply chain catastrophes and to re-establish the US as a major chips manufacturer.
To date, the CHIPS Act has allocated more than $32 billion in proposed funding across 18 companies, 16 states, and 26 projects. However, no CHIPS funding has yet been disbursed to any companies, according to the US Department of Commerce.
TSMC is the main supplier of chips for both Nvidia and Apple. The CHIPS Act allocated $6.6 billion in grants and $5 billion in loans, along with a 25% tax credit, to incentivize the company to build three fabs in Arizona. TSMC’s first facility was scheduled to open this year, but the company pushed that back to next year after labor shortages surfaced.
The US reshoring efforts come at a time when the industry doesn’t have anywhere near the workforce — including technicians, computer scientists, and engineers — required to support future needs. By some estimates, the US semiconductor industry will face a worker shortfall of between 59,000 and 146,000 workers by 2029. A minimum of 50,000 trained semiconductor engineers will be needed over the next several years in the US to meet the overwhelming and rapidly growing demand, according to a study by Purdue University.
The broader US economy is set to have a gap of 1.4 million such workers, according to a 2023 study from the Semiconductor Industry Association. So the competition will be fierce over those skilled workers. Compounding the problem is an ongoing exodus of existing talent as older workers retire. A study from Deloitte found that nearly 90% of tech leaders interviewed cited recruiting as their biggest challenge.
A TSMC spokesperson shared statements regarding the Phoenix fab with Computerworld from a third quarter earnings call by CEO C.C. Wei, but declined to comment on Cassidy’s claim directly.
“Our first fab entered engineering wafer production in April with 4-nanometer process technology, and the result is a highly satisfactory, with a very good yield,” Wei said. “This is an important operational milestone for TSMC and our customers, demonstrating TSMC’s strong manufacturing capability and execution.”
Wei said he expects volume production of the company’s first Arizona fab to start in early 2025, and he is “confident” it will deliver “the same level of manufacturing quality and reliability” from our fabs in Taiwan.
TSMC is also building two other fabs in the Phoenix area that will use more advanced technologies based on its customer needs, Wei said. The second fab is scheduled to begin volume production in 2028 and the third fab will begin production by the end of the decade.
“Thus, TSMC will continue to play a critical and integral role in enabling our customers’ success, while remaining a key partner and enabler of the US semiconductor industry,” Wei said.
Reshore Now’s Moser said it would be good to know whether the Phoenix fab uses identical equipment as in Taiwan, speculating that the US plant could have been more modern. “Was it accomplished solely by US workers or significantly by Taiwanese brought over to aid the start-up?” he said.
Apple’s week of Mac began today with a newly announced iMac, now beefed up with an M4 chip and more internal memory. Apple says the iMac is up to 4.5 times faster than an equivalent all-in-one Intel Core 7 Windows PC — and promises the machine will deliver up to six times the performance of the most popular Intel-based iMac.
The inference is obvious: if you use your iMac professionally, you might want to think about an upgrade. Reinforcing the point, Apple says the iMac is up to 1.7 times faster for most tasks and 2.1 times faster for more advanced tasks when compared to the M1 model.
Apple sets the scene for its AI
Part of the reason for this improved performance is the big boost to 16GB of unified onboard memory (configurable to 24GB). That memory boost is to support Apple Intelligence, which is also available for Macs running macOS Sequoia 15.1 or above. The Neural Engine in M4 chips is 3x faster than the M1. (Apple Intelligence is also now available for iPhones and iPads running iOS/iPad OS 18.1.)
Be warned, the entry-level $1,299 iMac might not reach these performance heights as it ships with an 8-core CPU; the rest of the range offers 10 cores. You do get hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which is going to make a big difference when you use the Mac.
Apple’s AI platform play means all its current devices will now support Apple Intelligence, meaning the company now offers the world’s biggest AI ecosystem.
What else is new?
The iMac display continues to be the same 24-in. 4.5K Retina display we all know and love, with a new nano-texture glass option available if color fidelity and anti-reflection matters to you.
Starting at $1,299, the new iMacs are available in a “parade” of colors, including green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. Buyers get: a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera with support for Desk View; a brilliant microphone and speaker system; and four USB-C ports, all of which support Thunderbolt 4. You can even run two external displays. Wrapping it up, you’ll find Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1 along with TouchID support, thanks to a button on the keyboard.
Overall, this is a solid and update, but it has to be said that it doesn’t seem to be the main attraction — that honor this week is likely to be all about a smaller machine….
We’re still waiting for the Mac mini
I can’t help but feel the iMac is being seen through a lens of pre-announcement speculation for the Mac mini. That product is already attracting lots of interest — just look at the pre-release headlines:
“This is the Mac Mini’s big moment” (The Verge).
“A tiny Mac mini could be the ultimate travel companion and I can’t wait for it” (TechRadar).
“Apple Mac mini with M4 chip could be a game-changer for creatives, here’s why” (Hindustan Times).
Talk about setting the scene.
Even Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has put his well-connected assessment out there; he obliquely tells us that even if you are quite happy with your M1 Mac mini, the move to M4 processors “could feel as significant as that first shift from Intel machines to Apple chips.”
That’s borne out by Apple’s iMac claims above. What we can piece together from the iMac introduction is that the new Mac mini will also deliver huge performance boosts in contrast to the M1 or M2 models already in use.
That’s an upgrade productivity benefits are built on in some industries, and it suggests that if your business has M1 (or older) Mac minis in its fleet, the new M4 models seem to be a tempting upgrade. After all, you don’t even need to replace the display….
Will a M4 Mac mini be the new Mac for business?
This introduction is expected to be about more than the silicon inside these Macs — it’s also the new design around them. If reports are correct, the new mini may be significantly smaller as Apple’s designers draw yet another benefit out of the energy and heat dissipation advantages of the company’s Arm-based chips.
Expect it to be a small aluminium box that’s taller but otherwise similar in size to the current Apple TV. I visualize this as being a box about half the size of a regular paperback book and perhaps as thick as three average length novels stacked atop each other. That’s really small. And it should now come with 16GB of base memory and support for Apple Intelligence.
Speaking just last year, MacStadium CTO Chris Chapman told me his existing server farms full of Mac minis used so much less power that his data center providers were, “always calling us up to tell us we’re not using enough power for the space.”
If the smaller size means lower energy consumption (and given what we know of Apple’s silicon evolution so far, it probably does), then for enterprises handling hundreds of these machines — or any other Mac, come to that — the M4 upgrade promises significant reductions in energy costs.
A good start to a week of Mac
Combined with the faster chip, these tiny desktop Mac minis or larger iMacs are going to run just about anything you want as effectively as a hot knife through butter.
That’s why the upcoming Mac mini has generated so much interest, even before its introduction. Combined with the impressive iMac rollout today and anticipation around the expected powerful MacBook Pro improvements, Apple’s big week of Mac news is off to a strong start. But will it distract or focus interest on the company’s end of year results announcement Thursday?
OpenAI plans to release its next major flagship model, Orion, by December, according to The Verge — and Microsoft, which has invested heavily in Open AI, is said to be ready to launch Orion on Azure as early as November.
Orion is intended to be the successor to GPT-4 and is said to be up to 100 times stronger. However, unlike Open AI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, it will not be released first through the AI assistant Chat GPT. Instead, OpenAI plans to first give a collection of companies access to the AI model so they can use it to build their own products.
It’s unclear whether the new model will be called GPT-5 or something else. Both Open AI and Microsoft declined to comment on the report, though OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix told The Verge the company doesn’t “have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year.”
Microsoft has moved to simplify how Office app files are opened on mobile devices after users cited uncertainty around the process.
Opening a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file on a mobile device typically means the Microsoft 365 mobile app will start up rather than the relevant standalone app.
This has been the case since Microsoft introduced an Office mobile app for Android and iOS in 2019. The Office app combined Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps into a single app to create an “integrated experience” and reduce the need to switch between tools, Microsoft said at the time.
After user feedback, Microsoft announced last week that the standalone apps will be used to open files instead — as long as the standalone Office apps are installed on a user’s device; if not, files will continue to open in the Microsoft 365 app.
Aside from reducing confusion, opening the standalone app will make it easier to multitask, Microsoft said in a blog post, with multiple Office apps open at once.
“For customers who want to open more than one Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file at once, the standalone apps can better handle side by side and windowing scenarios that modern tablet and mobile operating systems support,” said Samer Sawaya, a principal product manager at Microsoft.
Microsoft has started apply the change across its Office apps for iOS and Android, beginning with OneDrive. Outlook will follow this month and in November, while the timing for Teams has yet to be confirmed.
Workspace is Google’s suite of productivity software tools, the main competitor to market leader Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). Formerly known as G Suite, Google Workspace includes well-known apps such as Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Slides — apps that are also used for free by billions of people globally.
Google has been selling productivity apps to businesses for almost two decades now, having helped pave the way for cloud-based office productivity apps in the 2000s. At a time when most office suites were based on installed desktop software and sold as one-time purchases, Google bundled its popular free web apps with various business services to create a cloud-based office software subscription — a move that would eventually push competitors like Microsoft to adopt a subscription model and develop web versions of their apps.
Google was “very much ahead of the game” at this point and “even 11 or 12 years ago when Office 365 lagged behind what Google was doing with SaaS-based enterprise services,” said Joe Mariano, director analyst and member of Gartner’s Employee Experience Technology team.
The flexibility of Workspace’s cloud-hosted apps was then and continues to be a key draw for business customers, said Mariano: “The proposition is going to a completely SaaS-based set of services,” which allows for “deep interconnectivity” between the various components of the Workspace suite. “Because everything is based in the cloud on the Google Workspace architecture, you see a lot more seamless integration between those services,” he said.
These days, Google’s top priority for Workspace is the integration of generative AI features via its Gemini AI assistant (formerly Duet AI), introduced last year. The company has long been a major player in AI research and began to integrate AI features into its apps well before the recent generative AI boom — smart replies being one early example. With Gemini now available to embed into a range of Workspace apps (for an additional monthly fee), Google promises to save office workers time on tasks like writing emails, summarizing documents, and tracking down information.
In this article:
What is Google Workspace?
What happened to G Suite?
What are the different Google Workspace plans?
What add-ons are available for Google Workspace?
What is Gemini for Google Workspace?
How does Google Workspace adoption compare with Microsoft 365?
How easy is it to move from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace?
What are some of the newest Google Workspace features?
What’s next for Google Workspace?
What is Google Workspace?
Workspace is Google’s suite of cloud-based productivity and collaboration apps, typically sold as a paid monthly subscription to business and enterprise customers.
Apps included in most Workspace plans cover core business productivity and collaboration use cases: email (Gmail), document editing (Docs), spreadsheets (Sheets), presentations (Slides), videoconferencing (Meet), team messaging (Chat), and scheduling (Calendar), to name just a handful of the available apps. Paid add-ons are available too, such as the Gemini AI assistant, Google Voice telephony services, and premium features of the no-code development platform AppSheet.
Workspace apps are accessed via a browser or mobile app, with no native desktop apps, aside from document storage app Google Drive. It’s possible to save and access files without an internet connection, though, once offline access is enabled for Drive. Users can also edit Docs, Sheets, and Slides files offline in the Chrome browser.
Although Google offers many of these same apps to consumers for free, paid Workspace subscriptions include additional features and business services such as a custom email domain, higher storage limits, and shared team storage. Google also provides a range of security, management, and analytics tools for IT admins in most paid Workspace subscriptions — with more advanced tools available on pricier plans aimed at large enterprise organizations. These range from device management to data retention tools, employee usage analytics, and more.
Not all Workspace plans are paid, however: Google in 2021 expanded the brand to bring some features that were formerly reserved for paid plans, such as smart canvases, to the free consumer versions of its apps under the banner of “Google Workspace for everyone.” Google also offers a limited free version of Workspace for business customers, called Google Workspace Essentials Starter.
The list of available apps in Workspace is somewhat shorter than that of Microsoft 365. “Google Workspace doesn’t reach feature parity with M365; it offers perhaps 60% to 70% of the features,” said J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst on Forrester’s Future of Work team, though he describes the generative AI tools in Gemini for Google Workspace as “robust.”
Providing a more streamlined set of applications can be a good thing for business users, said Gartner’s Mariano. “Google doesn’t build new products, they build new services into their existing products, so it creates a lot less confusion,” he said. Take Gmail, for example. “You can live in your Gmail window all day if you want to: you can start writing new documents from there, you can check your calendar, you can start Chat, you can check Google Drive. The amount of digital friction that cuts back on is very, very significant.”
What happened to G Suite?
Although many business users still think of Google’s app suite as “G Suite,” the old name has gone — the Workspace brand replaced G Suite in 2020.
The switch to Workspace was not the first name change for Google’s bundle of work apps, which has roots back in the mid ’00s. Google Apps for Your Domain was the first iteration in 2006: a free ad-supported suite that included Gmail, Google Calendar, Page Creator (later Sites), and the Google Talk instant messaging app.
In 2007, the company began offering a paid ad-free subscription service aimed at businesses; initially called Google Apps Premier, it was later renamed Google Apps for Business and then Google Apps for Work. In 2016, the company announced its new G Suite brand with great fanfare, only to replace it four years later with the Workspace rebranding.
What are the different Google Workspace plans?
There are numerous payment plans for Google Workspace, targeted at everything from the smallest of small businesses up to large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of employees.
Google Workspace Individual: Aimed at sole traders/entrepreneurs, the Individual plan costs $8.33 per month on an annual basis and provides access to apps such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Meet. The plan includes 1TB of storage and features such as appointment booking, live streaming on YouTube, and custom email layouts, as well as access to support. Custom email addresses are not included, so your address will end in “@gmail.com.”
Business Starter, Business Standard, and Business Plus: Targeted at small and midsize businesses, the three plans have a limit of 300 users and cost from $6 per user a month up to $18 per user a month. The lowest tier, Starter, provides 30GB of storage per user, custom email addresses, and Meet video calls with up to 100 participants.
All three Business plans include access to Workspace apps, but certain features — such as Meet breakout rooms — are available only on the more expensive tiers. Each Business plan includes endpoint management features, but advanced tools, such as Google’s Vault information governance and e-discovery, require Standard and Plus subscriptions.
Enterprise Standard and Plus: Suited to large businesses, there’s no cap on the number of users for the two Enterprise plans. Each user is assigned 5TB of storage, though more can be requested, while the Meet meeting cap is lifted to 1,000 participants.
Enterprise plans offer a wider range of security and management tools than Business tiers, including data loss prevention and advanced security analytics via the Workspace security center. The Enterprise Plus plan is the top Workspace tier, with features such as client-side encryption and advanced data exports. Pricing information isn’t publicly available.
Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus: These Workspace plans lower subscription costs (or drop them entirely) by removing Gmail. Essentials Starter is a free service aimed at business customers that provides up to 100 users with access to core Workspace apps. There’s little in the way of management features, and there are usage restrictions such as three Meet video call participants at a time.
Enterprise Essentials and Enterprise Essentials Plus — aimed at larger organizations — include premium app features, access to security and management tools, and no limit on the number of users. The Essentials Plus plan offers more storage per user and a wider range of advanced management tools and app features. Google doesn’t publish pricing for its Enterprise Essentials or Essentials Plus plans.
Note: A previous plan, called simply “Essentials,” is no longer available to new customers.
Frontline Starter and Frontline Standard: There are two Workspace editions for staff in roles such as customer service, retail, and manufacturing who do most of their work away from a desk. Both include core Workspace apps and management tools available in the Business editions. The Standard plan includes a wider range of security and admin tools, such as data loss prevention and Google Vault eDiscovery. Google doesn’t publish pricing for its Workspace Frontline plans.
Workspace Education Fundaments is free for qualifying institutions, while Education Standard costs $3 per student per year and includes additional security and admin features. Teaching and Learning Upgrade costs $4 per staff member per month for Education Fundamentals and Standard customers; it provides access to extra Classroom and video-communication features. The Education Plus plan is $5 per student per year and includes all the aforementioned features as well as organizational branding and more.
Workspace for Nonprofits, Workspace for Government, Workspace for various verticals: Google offers discounted pricing of its paid products to qualifying nonprofit and government organizations. Workspace for Government can be configured to meet FedRAMP High compliance standards required by US government organizations. Google also offers industry-specific editions of its Enterprise plans tailored for healthcare and life sciences, retail, manufacturing, professional services, and technology firms. Contact Google for pricing.
What add-ons are available for Google Workspace?
There are numerous add-ons for Workspace that, in most cases, require an extra monthly fee on top of core subscription costs. These add-ons provide access to some of the latest Workspace features and can broaden the suite’s functionality significantly, with the potential to increase a customer’s monthly spending at the same time.
Access to Gemini, Google’s generative AI assistant, adds an extra $30 per user a month to Workspace Enterprise subscriptions, for example. Google also provides a business telephony service, Voice, that costs from $10 per user per month for the Starter version up to $30 per user a month for the Premium version.
No-code development platform AppSheet Core is included in most paid Workspace subscriptions, but full functionality requires an additional fee. Similarly, Google Chrome Enterprise provides additional security and management tools over the free Core version for $6 per user per month.
Among the other add-ons is “Chat interoperability” — a free service that lets Workspace Chat users send messages to other collaboration tools such as Teams and Slack.
What is Gemini for Google Workspace?
Gemini is the name of Google’s generative AI assistant; it’s available as a standalone chatbot and can be embedded into various Workspace apps. It’s built on Google’s own Gemini AI models, such as Gemini 1.5 Pro and Imagen 3. The AI assistant was made generally available for business users in August 2023 under the name Duet AI, before switching to the Gemini branding in February this year.
Gemini for Google Workspace is an add-on subscription that gives business users access to premium Gemini features. There are two main versions of Gemini for Workspace: Enterprise and the less expensive Business tier, which launched in February this year.
Until recently, a Gemini for Google Workspace subscription was required for access to both the standalone Gemini app and the embedded version of the assistant. The Gemini app is now included with Workspace business plans, but the ability to interact with Gemini in the Workspace apps still requires a Gemini for Google Workspace subscription.
And in-app use is arguably where the assistant is most useful. Gemini can summarize a lengthy document in Docs, for example, draft an email in Gmail, create images in Slides with Google’s Imagen 3 text-to-video model, and plenty more besides. Google outlines numerous potential business use cases, from marketing professionals generating campaign briefs to HR workers creating job descriptions.
The business versions of Gemini offer many of the same features as the consumer versions of Gemini. One key difference is that Google won’t access data from user prompts to improve its own products and to train its AI models on the paid business versions, according to Google.
Gemini Business is available as a paid add-on across all Workspace subscriptions and costs $20 per user a month. For Gemini Business there’s a cap of 1,000 interactions — where Gemini is directed to summarize an email, or redraft a document, for example — with the AI assistant per user each month.
Gemini Enterprise tier, which costs $30 per user each month, is available as a paid add-on for all Workspace plans, apart from Business Starter and Individual. It includes access to a wider range of features, such as live translated captions and automated note taking in Meet video calls. It also removes the cap on user interactions each month.
Google has also made the AI assistant available to higher education institutions with Gemini Education ($20 per user each month) and Education Premium ($30 per user each month).
Not all Workspace customers require the full list of Gemini functionality for staff, and, for many workers, AI assistants have proved most effective in and around meetings. To cater to these customers, Google launched an add-on “AI Meetings and Messages” that includes access to Gemini features in Meet only, for lower price of $10 per user a month.
There’s also an “AI Security” add-on, also costing $10 per user per month, that provides access to AI-powered document classification in Google Drive. (The feature is also available in the more expensive Gemini Enterprise subscription.)
How does Google Workspace adoption compare with Microsoft 365?
Although Microsoft has retained its formidable lead in the market, Google has succeeded in establishing Workspace as a competitive office software suite. It’s hard to say exactly how Workspace adoption has fared in comparison with Microsoft 365 and other productivity app suites, but there are some indications.
Google reports 10 million paying customers for Workspace, while Microsoft claims more than 400 million paid commercial seats (end users) for Office 365/Microsoft 365. Google says its figure refers to the total number of organizations of any size that pay for Workspace, rather than the total number of paid seats/users across customer organizations, but this likely includes some extremely small — even one-person — businesses, which makes a comparison difficult.
The other stat that Google provides — of 3 billion users — is less useful, as it mostly relates to consumer use of its free apps. “While billions of consumers use free versions of Google Workspace applications, its use in enterprises remains limited — dwarfed by the popularity of Microsoft 365,” said Gownder.
Financial statements from Google’s parent company Alphabet do little to shed light on Workspace business adoption, as Workspace revenues are part of the “Google Cloud” segment that also includes Google Cloud Platform, Google’s wider cloud computing infrastructure and analytics service. In an earnings call for Alphabet’s most recent quarterly financial statement (Q2 FY24), CEO Sundar Pichai only noted that a 29% year-on-year increase in Google Cloud revenues was due, in part, to “strong Workspace growth.” This growth was mostly down to increases in average revenue per seat, said Pichai — an indication that, like others in the space, Google sees more value in increasing sales with existing customers than expanding its overall customer base.
Nevertheless, Google is gaining ground on M365, said Mariano, albeit slowly. “I do believe we will see continued market growth for Google Workspace,” he said. “Although it’s incremental, we do see that they are getting a little bit of market share every year.”
Google has managed to lure large enterprises such as Verizon and Airbus away from its rival, and, more recently, announced that 250,000 US Army personnel would be given Workspace licenses, a further sign of the suite’s acceptance by large organizations.
“When we look at the Western world, we see that Microsoft and Google are the two dominant players in this space,” Mariano said.
A key driver for business interest in Workspace is the cost compared to M365, said Mariano. Businesses are wary of the rising expenditure on Microsoft’s suite, he said, even if the reality is that, for the most part, businesses are unlikely to see significant savings by switching to Workspace.
“The term that I have heard from multiple IT leaders and CIOs I’ve talked to is the cost increase of Microsoft 365 is not sustainable,” said Mariano. “That is making them think much harder about Google Workspace than they have in the past.”
Gownder also sees Google’s efforts to target Workspace at educational institutions over the years starting to pay off. “Younger cohorts of employees, because they used Google Workspace in school, might have a preference for the suite over the less familiar Microsoft 365,” he said.
Another factor is that, after emerging from a reactive crisis mode during the pandemic, IT leaders are now in a better position to evaluate their workplace app strategy.
“When we look back at the pandemic era, Microsoft feasted: everybody ran to Microsoft, because it’s what they had,” Mariano said. “I think the dust has settled, and a lot of IT leaders and CIOs are looking at what’s left after the fact now and saying, ‘What did we do, and should we be here?’ They’re taking the time to decide what the next five to 10 years are going to look like.”
How easy is it to move from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace?
For many businesses, adopting Workspace will mean migrating users from Microsoft’s business productivity apps. Google provides tools to help customers make the transition.
The Google Workspace Migrate tool lets admins move large amounts of content into a Workspace domain. Workspace Migrate can be used to move data from Microsoft Exchange (2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019), Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint (2010, 2013, and 2016), SharePoint Online, and Microsoft OneDrive for Business. It can also be used to migrate data from cloud storage platform Box, file share systems, and other Workspace domains. Workspace Migrate is available for Workspace Business Standard and Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, and Education Standard and Education Plus.
For smaller migrations from certain Microsoft products, Google has other options: Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Exchange (GWMME), Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Outlook (GWMMO), and the data migration service.
Google also introduced a new file migration service in open beta recently that aims to simplify the transfer of files between from OneDrive to Google Drive for up to 100 employees at a time, and promises “minimal disruption” to end users during the process.
Nevertheless, a full migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace is not for the faint-hearted. Such a project can require a “monumental effort” for a large enterprise, said Gownder: “There’s just a lot of complexity to manage, despite the assistive tools Google offers,” he said.
One of the challenges businesses face is that some aspects of the Microsoft 365 suite don’t have a clear destination in Google Workspace. For example, it’s hard to migrate Teams data in a way that makes sense, said Gownder, while Excel has entire programming sequences, macros, and other content approaches that can break when migrating them to Sheets. “Large organizations would want to work with an external consulting partner, and it won’t be a small project,” he said.
What are some of the newest Google Workspace features?
At the top of the agenda for Google is the integration of its Gemini AI assistant across Workspace apps.
One recently launched Gemini for Workspace feature in Meet is “Take notes for me,” which tasks the AI assistant with note taking during a video call, allowing participants to concentrate on their meeting.
Gemini can take notes in Google Meet meetings.
Google
A recent update to Gemini in Gmail’s “Help me write” feature — which uses generative AI to draft an email — adds three options to refine the text of an email: Formalize, Elaborate, and Shorten.
Gems are also now available for Gemini users. Similar to OpenAI’s GPT, Gems are customized versions of the AI chat assistant that can be instructed to respond in certain ways: coding partner and writing editor are examples of two pre-built Gems provided by Google.
In terms of the core Workspace apps, one fairly recent addition is “smart chips,” an array of interactive elements you can embed in Docs and Sheets to enhance collaboration. When a co-worker clicks on an embedded chip, they can either see more information, such as the contact details for a person or business, or take an action, such as changing a task’s status via a dropdown menu.
loading="lazy" width="400px">A people smart chip reveals contact info for that person.
Howard Wen / IDG
Currently under development is a new Workspace app: Vids. This is a video creation app that guides users through the process of producing simple videos for purposes such as sales pitches, employee onboarding, and learning and development. An AI assistant in the app can create a storyboard and suggest background images, for instance, and offers pre-set voiceovers to narrate a video. The app is now in preview in Workspace Labs.
What’s next for Google Workspace?
Although Gemini has been built into a wide range of Workspace apps already, it’s fair to say that Google will continue to focus its efforts on developing the AI assistant for work use.
“I think it’s Gemini, Gemini, Gemini for them right now,” said Mariano.
One AI feature in development is the AI Teammate for Workspace — an AI agent that human workers can interact directly with in the Workspace Chat app. The prototype, unveiled at Google I/O this year, could be used for a variety of purposes — to monitor and track projects, for example.
It remains to be seen whether Google’s investments in Gemini will result in attracting more businesses to the Workspace suite, however. “Google continues to bolster Workspace with AI-based tools, but we are not yet at the point where enterprises are saying they will migrate to Google Workspace because of Gemini,” said Gownder.
One strength for Google could lie in the combination of its Gemini and Workspace apps with its hardware business, with Google’s Pixel phones able to run AI on-device. “That is a competitive advantage for them that we could see grow in the next couple years, as we see what happens with AI,” said Mariano.
It’s not all about AI, though: Another intriguing product in the works is Project Starline, a 3D videoconferencing system that gives users the feeling that they’re in the same room. Google recently announced that it plans to make the system, which it has been developing for several years, commercially available in 2025.
