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I'm on a team of 4 people working on a giant accounting spreadsheet simultaneously. It wouldn't be possible without collaborative editing. Previously, the same
by ThJ 8y ago
I'm on a team of 4 people working on a giant accounting spreadsheet simultaneously. It wouldn't be possible without collaborative editing. Previously, the same team has worked on white papers simultaneously. In theory, we could've done that by merging documents near the end, but we were adding, dropping and moving sections while writing everything, so the end result wouldn't have been the same.
There are other areas where I sorely miss collaborative editing. I want every piece of application software to support it. I hate transferring files. I love sharing live documents. My problem is that few people outside of this team I'm talking about seem to understand how powerful collaborative real-time editing can be. People of all ages are still emailing me Word documents like it's 1997. My head is in the future, the world is living in the past.
Same goes for smartphone usage, really. Try sending calendar invites to someone who's barely aware of the calendar on his phone because he only uses it for Instagram and calling his mates. Technologies to augment the human intellect are all around us, but most of us are really bad at using them.
- chvid 8y agoJust to clarify; I am not saying that there isn't a use case. I am just questioning whether it is the general case that products should designed around and maybe that is the reason why we don't see more of it. If you have 4 people writing a book together would you really sit there in realtime with 4 cursors and typing away on the same document? Or would you structure, delegate and spread things out across time and space (doing most of the work) and then later edit and merge it together.
- vidarh 8y agoI work in a team of 15 people where our last offsite was planned mostly on a single Google Docs document where we all edited sections, marked checklists, added comments at the same time. The other day I was in our company flat that doubles as occasional office, and three people in the flat and one remote all edited the same document at the same time. This is business as usual for us. We'd still structure, delegate and spread things out across time and space, but why should we need to do it in separate documents? It adds effort to copy and merge things and shift things around. Sometimes one person writes a part and passes it off to another person (or three) to proofread and edit, and they may move paragraphs around, or copy in paragraphs from another section.
- reificator 8y ago> Or would you structure, delegate and spread things out across time and space (doing most of the work) and then later edit and merge it together. I tend to have the programmer's mindset about things like this. Put it in version control and let the VCS tool help you split and merge and fork and pull as well as track your changes over time and the reasoning behind them. You tend to favor the workflow you know, after all.