Google Area 120's 'Tables' project to become Google Cloud product
An announcement on June 11 revealed that a project called Tables, developed under Google's in-house idea incubator program, will become a "fully-supported Google Cloud product" in 2022. Tables is a "user-friendly, intuitive work tracking tool" that provides corporations and teams with a scalable solution for saving time and working smarter. Until the official Google Cloud product release, Tables will remain free to use.
Google's in-house idea incubator dubbed Area 120 launched the beta version of Tables back in September 2020. It has been used by numerous public and private organizations such as National Geographic, the Wyoming State Construction Department, and the Somerset County Library System of New Jersey.
From the get-go, Tables was designed to integrate with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), Google's ecosystem of corporate solutions. This helped Tables evolve into a tool that combined project and task management, support ticket management for IT operations, client relationship management for sales, applicant tracking for employee recruitment and onboarding, and workflow management. All these features were rolled into a centralized workspace dashboard.
Additionally, Tables allows teams to automate tasks, set up customizable task views, integrate with Google Chat and Slack, and collect customer feedback with Forms without sharing underlying spreadsheets. 9to5Google reported that in an email to Google Cloud customers, the search giant confirmed long-term plans for investing in this product area. The search giant noted that there is sufficient market demand for such a tool.
The beta version of Tables that customers have been using will remain accessible for free. Tables' website advertises two plans—one of which is free while the other costs $10 per user per month. However, Google reportedly hadn't charged customers for the paid plan even though it provided all the features, including more actions per table, a longer change history, and more bots per table.
Google will begin charging customers on a per-user basis once Tables is incorporated into Google Cloud's offerings. Tables' website explains that the current pricing is designed to provide the paid plan's additional features to users who need them. Interestingly, paid plan beta users haven't been billed yet. Although Google didn't say, we believe that pricing will be revised after the Google Cloud integration.
Another Area 120 endeavor that was recently incorporated into the Chrome browser for Android was GameSnacks. The service brings lightweight HTML5 games to devices with limited processing power and access to slower internet connections. Thankfully, Tables is one of Area 120's projects that didn't bite the dust. The idea incubator has numerous ambitious products that were discontinued due to various reasons.
