It’s impressive when companies constantly churn out products and features and it’s even more impressive the larger the company. In my mind this used to be Amazon but lately I’ve been surprised by how often Google Calendar is updated. It feels as if every month there’s at least one update that I accidentally discover and get a pleasant surprise.

Google Calendar underwent a major redesign earlier this year and it seemed to have been the foundation for the recent improvements. I’m sure I’m not capturing everything but just in the past few months the following features were launched:

• Room suggestions. By adding a bit of metadata to each room ranging from location to capacity Google Calendar suggest a room that matches the size and location of your guestlist.
• Cancellation notification. If everyone invited to a meeting declines Google lets you know and gives you the option of releasing the booked room.
• OOO handling. This one is great. I booked a meeting with the subject “OOO” and got the option to automatically decline all invites during that time.
• Time proposals. This is a small addition but a nice touch that allows an invitee to propose a new time straight from the invite.
• A ton more that can be found on the wonderful GSuite update blog.

The features themselves are not important and I expect them to get more and more intelligent as Google applies more and more of its AI prowess to automating more and more of our lives. I really like this as an example of investing in a proper foundation which then increases your ability to quickly ship new features and code.