Speaking of: Google Workspace

Apple is usually the company known for giving users features "you didn't even know you wanted," but I am consistently impressed with how Google continues to improve its Google Workspace apps to make the work day marginally less annoying.

It's never revolutionary change, and thank God it's not. The last thing I want is an artsy design overhaul of Google Docs. But assigning actions to people within docs by tagging their email? That's useful. Automatically creating and linking a template for meeting notes to every calendar invite? That's useful. Integrating Zoom directly into Google Calendar to add Zoom links to every calendar invite? That's useful. Elevating email threads in your Gmail inbox that have sat silent for a number of days? Doesn't seem to fix the problem of people professionally ghosting me, but that's useful.

I don't think I've given Google enough credit in the last few years for the genuinely amazing products they've created. Sure, their data collection practices border on outright surveillance, and it's still unclear whether anyone besides tech bloggers will ever use a Pixel. But even though Zoom gets all the credit for enabling remote work at a mass scale, I think it's hard to overlook how revolutionary Google Workspace has been in unlocking remote collaboration on documents for companies and schools. I don't find any of their apps to be nearly as powerful as the Microsoft versions they're copying, and the UIs definitely value function over beauty. But am I going to complain about having a poor man's Microsoft Office for free in the cloud, accessible to anyone and still perfectly capable of handling 99% of productivity work? Absolutely not, especially when Google continues making these incremental changes to help integrate their services like a true ecosystem.

Nice work, Google.