What the hell does this announcement actually say? Is this just Gsuite? Are they introducing a lower price tier? What is the pricing? How do existing customers transition?
The rebranding from "Google hangouts" and "Gsuite" to "Google Workspace" and everything inbetween I have to say has been a tremendously terrible marketing job, given the talent of the people at that company.
Judging mostly by the presented visual evidence rather than the PR-speak, I believe it says they're merging Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Hangouts into a single tightly-integrated SPA with a top-level Slack-like groupware layer to navigate it all. Insofar as a "Google Workspace" is a thing like a "Slack team" or a "Discord server", it'll probably also be internally modelled as a GSuite org.
Again presumably, the GSuite Admin Dashboard would thus likely be integrated into the SPA as well (i.e. this SPA would now "be" GSuite) — but for the people only paying for a Google Workspace, not a GSuite org, they'd probably see a version of the GSuite Admin dashboard where most of the more complex functionality related to domains / group policy / etc. is hidden, with the stripped-down version matching something more akin to a Slack team's admin panel: user management, group management, storage management, and app/integration management.
The new Web UI has gotten quite a lot faster since release. Mine fully loads in under a second now, with one more second for hangouts to connect. The Android app I have all the tabs disabled though, but I don't have any speed problems there either. Are you still experiencing the slow performance that were there at launch?
I claimed the new UI itself has improved quite a bit since its release 2 years ago. I'm not sure what that has to do with Gmail beta from over a decade ago.
Welcome to Google Synonym[1] - a new Google service that helps you navigate the Marketing Graph of product names and their relationship with each other over time. Think of it like Google Maps if the map was a mind map produced by our product teams!
I was hoping it was a bundling of apps/data/content along more task/project/team/org lines as opposed to the very user-centric organizational structure.
Sadly for me, it seems like a re-brand like you said. It also seems like they may be planning on evolving the communication suites Email, Chat, Video Chat, to be a more integrated experience a la Microsoft Teams or Front?
I don't know about free: it starts at $6/month for an individual business account. Google may treat it like an upgrade, sort of how they charge for more Drive space.
The rebranding from "Google hangouts" and "Gsuite" to "Google Workspace" and everything inbetween I have to say has been a tremendously terrible marketing job, given the talent of the people at that company.