Can Google “G Suite” take over Microsoft’s hold of the Productivity tool market?
Now more than 5 million paying businesses are using G Suite to work faster, smarter, and more collaboratively— from small businesses to big companies like Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive, and Keller Williams. In the past year alone, 1 million new customers have signed up for G Suite.
What is G Suite? It is a suite of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed by Google Cloud, first launched on August 28, 2006. G Suite is comprised of:
- Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Currents for communication;
- Drive for storage;
- Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, Forms, and Sites for productivity and collaboration.
While these services are free to use for consumers, G Suite adds enterprise features such as custom email addresses at a domain (@yourcompany.com), option for unlimited cloud storage (depending on plan and number of members), additional administrative tools and advanced settings, as well as 24/7 phone and email support.
Microsoft Corp dominates the $15-billion market for business productivity tools however. The main reason: Its longstanding product is reliable and IT managers have little incentive to gamble on something new.
However, Google has made inroads by throwing more resources at this lucrative market and targeting business customers. Since Google got serious about developing features for major enterprises several years ago, the number of organizations paying for G Suite has doubled to over 5 million.
Most of those customers are small and medium-sized companies. But some big names that include:
- Airbnb.
- Uber.
- Netflix.
- Spotify.
- Dropbox.
- Pinterest.
- Gmail
Gmail is key to G Suites success. Gmail leads the way as the most popular email client, with over 25% of the market share. Gmail has been around since 2004 and now has over 1.2 billion users. One of the best things about G Suite is you basically get an enhanced ad-free version of the online email client most users are probably already using.
Here is a side by side comparison of G Suite and Office 365 products:
| G Suite Basic | Office 365 Business Essentials |
| Gmail | Outlook (50GB) |
| Google Drive (30GB) | OneDrive (1TB) |
| Google Docs | Microsoft Word |
| Google Sheets | Microsoft Excel |
| Google Slides | Microsoft PowerPoint |
| Google Sites | Sites (SharePoint) |
| Google Hangout Meet/Chat | Skype + Microsoft Teams |
| Google Keep | Microsoft OneNote |
| Google+ | Microsoft Yammer |
Microsoft has 60 million commercial customers signed up for its Office 365 product offering.
Google may never catch up to Microsoft but the market is huge and being 2nd as an alternative to Microsoft is not too bad!
