Google's Diane Green explains why 'Google for Work' is now 'Google Cloud'

Google Senior VP of Cloud Diane Greene is 40 weeks in to her stint as the ruler of the search giant's increasingly important enterprise software sales business, and she says that things are going great, except for one small thing.

Greene and her entourage will go to customer meetings, she says, and "kind of blow them away" with what Google can offer them. That includes the Google Apps cloud productivity suite and the Google Cloud Platform, which lets companies of all shapes and sizes pay by the minute for functionally unlimited supercomputing power.

But then, at the end of the meeting, Greene says, they'd almost always ask: "'Yeah, is Google really serious about the enterprise?' And it was kind of driving us crazy."

Google retired the name "Google Enterprise" back in 2014 in favor of the more approachable "Google for Work." But Greene says they started using Google Enterprise again unofficially over the last few months, internally and externally, just to drive it home to customers that, yes, Google is in the enterprise software business for the long haul.

They thought about making the name change back to "Google Enterprise" official, Greene says. But Google thought it wasn't descriptive enough of the company's products for small businesses and programmers. Plus, the name "Google Enterprise" is no less unwieldy now than it was in 2014.

And so, Greene today officially unveiled the new name: "Google Cloud," encompassing everything Google has for businesses and programmers. That's everything from Google Cloud Platform, to the company's tools for programmers building artificial intelligence-powered apps, to Android for companies, to the productivity tools.

Speaking of the productivity tools, they're getting a name change in the workplace, too: What was Google Apps for Work is now "G Suite," encompassing Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and other Google services.