This is intriguing and could prove disruptive on multiple fronts. That said, a widespread shift away from Microsoft or Google seems unlikely, given how deeply entrenched they are in organizations and enterprises worldwide.
What I find amazing is someone sat at OpenAI and said “let’s build an online productivity suite, how much would it cost?” And they came with a number and a plan and are executing it.
Well, come to think of it, perhaps the number came from ChatGPT, who knows.
Also, given the staggering amount of VC being burned in compute power for AI, probably building a Google Suite rival is pocket change.
Productivity suites can only make money through enterprise sales and that’s MS turf. Google, Apple… I’d say their suites are a loss leader for other stuff, whether it’s data for selling ads or hardware sales. What’s the upside for OpenAI, would their suite be so good that people would gladly pay for the paid GPT plans?
It’s a very interesting move!
I can’t understand what OpenAI are aiming for - if their development goes the way they hope, what will they sell or rent to customers? How many of those customers are there likely to be and what will they pay? It’s an urgent set of questions. They are currently spending about $5B a year more than they earn.
The investment funding they are attracting is of a scale that the company will have to be another Microsoft, Google or even Apple, for investors to make a return, but those companies were about creating a new or radically re-shaped market and then iterating to make the most of their lead in the market. The AI market is already crowded, though it’s arguable that Open AI has a lead. The productivity suite market is very crowded and is already well down the integration of AI assistance.
This says that OpenAI does not (yet) have a killer product of its own.
The whole AI/LLM boom may turn out to be a bubble.
I doubt Google loses money on their productivity apps.
The biggest thing that OpenAI probably want from this is more training data and to embed their AI into the products,
Enterprises won’t allow the use of data for training for a second, and questions are already being asked about MS and Google data protection practices in European countries, especially around schools data that the idea of providing it to OpenAI will be even less welcome.
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I’m a Google Workspace user, and I’m not so sure about that. Google only makes about 30% of their revenue from their cloud, networks, and non-search/YouTube ads business.
Google Workspace for Education has over 200 million students and educators worldwide, but only 9 million or so business users so . . . ?
OTOH it appears most startups, including those valued at $1 billion or higher, use Google Workspace. I wonder how many are former GW for Education kids? 
AFAIK OpenAI is planning/building their own data centers in the US and the UAE but is currently relying on Microsoft and, as of a few days ago, Google to run their workloads.
So any new cloud based productivity suite is probably some years away.
I completely understand that and respect your opinion, but I was (very poorly) suggesting that I doubt they lose money directly on Google Workspace/Productivity.
The Business starter level is £70 a year, Business Standard is £140 a year, these would both be for fairly light users and/or small organisations without complex security needs. £220 a year brings in more security maturity. For the full security suite it’s price on application. Edu accounts will be much cheaper as would charities
But given that they share infrastructure with the rest of the google portfolio, I could see them making $12-$20bn a year (Edu users at $5 a month alone would bring that in $12bn) That’s not pocket change, even for Google.
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It’s only $5/year for Education Plus in the U.S., but I didn’t know that google no longer includes free unlimited storage for education users. I agree, that would change things. 
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