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The story
From February 10, 2006, Google started testing a version of the service at San Jose City College, hosting Gmail accounts with SJCC domain addresses and admin tools for account management. On August 28, 2006, Google launched Google Apps for Your Domain, a set of apps for organizations. Available for free as a beta service, it included Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and the Page Creator, which was later replaced with Sites. Dave Girouard, then Google's vice president and general manager for enterprise, outlined its benefits for business customers: "Organizations can let Google be the experts in delivering high quality email, messaging, and other web-based services while they focus on the needs of their users and their day-to-day business". Google announced an edition for schools, then known as Google Apps for Education, on October 10, 2006.
On February 22, 2007, Google introduced Google Apps Premier Edition, which differed from the free version by offering more storage (10 GB per user), APIs for business integration, 99.9% uptime for Gmail, and 24/7 phone support. It cost $50 per user account per year. According to Google, early adopters of Google Apps Premier Edition included Procter & Gamble, San Francisco Bay Pediatrics, and Salesforce. Additionally, all editions of Google Apps were then able to use Documents and Spreadsheets, users could access Gmail on BlackBerry mobile devices, and administrators gained more application control. Further enhancements came, on June 25, 2007, when Google added a number of features to Google Apps, including mail migration from external IMAP servers, shared address books, a visual overhaul of Google Docs and Google Sheets, and increased Gmail attachment size. A ZDNet article noted that Google Apps now offered a tool for switching from the popular Exchange Server and Domino, positioning Google as an alternative to Microsoft and IBM. On October 3, 2007, a month after acquiring Postini, Google announced that the startup's email security and compliance options had been added to Google Apps Premier Edition. Customers now had the ability to better configure their spam and virus filtering, implement retention policies, restore deleted messages, and give administrators access to all emails.
Google introduced Sites on February 28, 2008. Google Sites provided a simple new Google Apps tool for creating Intranet and team websites.
On June 9, 2009, Google launched Google Apps Sync for Outlook, a plugin that allows customers to synchronize their email, calendar, and contacts data between Outlook and Google Apps. Less than a month later, on July 7, 2009, Google announced that the services included in Google Apps—Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Talk—were out of beta.
Google opened the Workspace Marketplace, on March 9, 2010, which is an online store for third-party business applications that integrate with Google Apps, to make it easier for users and software to do business in the cloud. Participating vendors included Intuit, Appirio, and Atlassian. On July 26, 2010, Google introduced an edition for governments, then-known as Google Apps for Government, which was designed to meet the public sector's unique policy and security needs. It was also announced that Google Apps had become the first suite of cloud applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation.
Nearly five years after the launch of Google Apps, on April 26, 2011, Google announced that organizations with more than 10 users were no longer eligible for the free edition of Google Apps. They would have to sign up for the paid version, now known as Google Apps for Business. A flexible billing plan was also introduced, giving customers the option of paying $5 per user per month with no contractual commitment.
On March 28, 2012, Google launched Google Vault, an optional electronic discovery and archiving service for Google Apps for Business customers. And then, on April 24, 2012, Google introduced Google Drive, a platform for storing and sharing files. Each Google Apps for Business user was given 5GB of Drive storage, with the option to purchase more. Later that year, Google announced that the free version of Google Apps would no longer be available to new customers.
Google unified the storage between Drive and Gmail, on May 13, 2013, giving Google Apps customers 30GB total that are shared across the apps.
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On March 10, 2014, Google launched the Google Apps Referral Program, which offers participating individuals a $15 referral bonus for each new Google Apps user they refer. Google, on June 25, 2014, announced Drive for Work, a new Google Apps offering featuring unlimited file storage, advanced audit reporting, and new security controls for $10 per user per month.
Google Enterprise, the company's business product division, was officially renamed Google for Work on September 2, 2014. Eric Schmidt, then Google's executive chairman said, "we never set out to create a traditional 'enterprise' business—we wanted to create a new way of doing work (...) so the time has come for our name to catch up with our ambition".
Google announced that Google Apps would be rebranded as G Suite on September 29, 2016. Then, on October 25, 2016, Google launched the first hardware product for G Suite, the Jamboard; a 55-inch digital whiteboard connected to the cloud.
Google announced that G Suite would be rebranded as Google Workspace on October 6, 2020, and that Workspace would emphasize increased integration between the apps, such as the ability to create Docs from within Chats, or start a Meet call from within a presentation. As part of the rebranding, the iconic logos for Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Meet, and other products in Google Workspace were changed. These new logos corresponded to the similar changes which happened in Maps and Photos. The logo redesigns were met with mixed reactions by end users.
On June 14, 2021, Google announced that Google Workspace would be available to consumers with an account, along with the ability for users to fully switch from Hangouts to Chat, the rebranding of the "Rooms" feature in Gmail to "Spaces", a new "Google Workspace Individual" tier, a progressive web app for Workspace applications, and more.
On January 19, 2022, Google announced any "G Suite legacy free edition" accounts must be upgraded to a paid tier by May 1, 2022, or the account will be automatically upgraded. If a user does not manually upgrade to a paid tier and if no payment information is entered in the account admin page, the account will be suspended starting July 1, 2022. The free tier of accounts were available for users to sign up for from 2007 until 2012 at which point they were changed to a legacy status. This will not affect access to other Google Services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases. On May 17, 2022, Google announced they would offer "G Suite legacy free edition" accounts the option to self-identify they are using these accounts for non-business use. This would then give them the chance to keep using this service for "Free". They did say that business features might be removed at a later date, without giving indication what those features might be.
In March 2023, Google brought generative AI capabilities to Google Workspace (initially to a limited set of trusted testers).
From Wikipedia’s article on Google Workspace, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4