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Simple: just install MS Visual SourceSafe! In all seriousness, though, I wanted this so badly that I started (and failed) a startup with 12 employees nine year

Simple: just install MS Visual SourceSafe! In all seriousness, though, I wanted this so badly that I started (and failed) a startup with 12 employees nine years ago to build it. It was conceived for use in working with "big data" but the system essentially provided Etherpad-like scrubbable versioning of all common office document formats as a side-effect. All of it was structured in an environment more similar to the social aspects of Github than Dropbox, but you could sync up to your filesystem via a FUSE wrapper. That is, people could easily follow or fork your work in progress. If we'd continued, you'd have been able to accept the equivalent of PRs on your Word docs. It was so awesome that we couldn't find anyone to pay for it, sadly. Armchair quarterbacks would fairly accuse us of failing to do proper customer development. I can't speak to the technical limitations of Dropbox's versioning implementation, but given that they already have both viewing AND versioning running for a decade, I honestly can't believe it would take more than a few months for a small team to implement Etherpad-like editing functionality for the office suite document formats.

haddr 7y ago
Open source it (if that's possible), let's figure out if there is community who would see value in it!
- peteforde 7y ago
  Sadly, impossible.
  - mercer 7y ago
    Could you explain why (just out of curiosity)?
    - donkeyd 7y ago
      Just going to go out on a limb and say the IP is owned by an investor. Paying 12 people isn't cheap, so that's why I assume there was an investor involved.
      - peteforde 7y ago
        Yes, all of the above. It's quite simply not mine to open source. If it was mine, people dramatically underestimate the effort and cost of supporting the OSS release of something like this. It was also written on what I'm guessing was Rails 3.2 (circa 2011). There was no Docker, no Kubernetes; it was a monolith with many moving parts. I also don't have access to the source code anymore, not easily. It's also true that the company that we started continues to exist with a new product, and I suspect that some of our original code lives on. It's just super messy.
        mercer 7y ago
        Thanks for elaborating
gwbas1c 7y ago
> but you could sync up to your filesystem via a FUSE wrapper. ... follow or fork ... accept the equivalent of PRs on your Word docs > It was so awesome that we couldn't find anyone to pay for it, sadly. Armchair quarterbacks would fairly accuse us of failing to do proper customer development. I get the impression that it was extremely complicated and didn't fit into anyone's workflow. IE, if you approached someone using Dropbox, they'd have to change far too many habits just to switch to you.
- peteforde 7y ago
  It was partially this, although Dropbox was not nearly as entrenched in 2011 as it is today... which by extension means that cloud storage was not a given like it is today. It's actually far more appropriate to say that we were competing with a culture where it's engrained in people to make those FINAL_FINAL2 versions on Samba shares. Or worse, to email them. I am biased but I'd give our UX a 7.5/10, and if we'd have continued it would have gotten smoother. The FUSE wrapper was not the primary interface by a long shot, though... in fact, I'm not sure it was used by many people outside of our team, in the end.
fragmede 7y ago
Dropbox has Etherpad-like functionality in its lesser known Dropbox paper product (which I find superior to Google Docs).
Enginerrrd 7y ago
That sounds pretty cool, though I'd have to think about how such a thing would function with the workflow of my team. I think it could be done though! It sounds like a more reliable way to do shared work on office docs. I see some issues with it. No matter how smooth you make this, any software with pull requests is going to be considered "technical". Christ, people think basic excel skills are "technical". SO you have to get over that hurdle. But personally, if I've already gotten people over that hurdle, I might as well just use git and LaTeX documents. I don't know, I think it sounds awesome, but I also think it might be tough to sell.
- peteforde 7y ago
  We tried to attack the market with a Github model: share your open source data and docs publicly (our true passion) and pay to have private repos. Our mistake, as I said elsewhere, is that there was no market. We had many sales conversations and zero takers. For context, we were fully under the spell of The Great Big Data Hype of 2011 (see the current AI hype for reference) and convinced ourselves that there would be so many opportunities that we'd have our pick of which path to take. In fairness to our past selves, for a while this seemed true; valuations were insane for companies with vague value props in the space. And we met with dozens of influencers in the data world and they all professed to be excited to use it. Most of them ultimately logged in once, realized they had no hair-on-fire problem for us to solve, and stopped returning our emails. It was frustrating in the extreme. I just found one of our product videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4
- peteforde 7y ago
  Also, we actually did make everything available via git alongside the web frontend, API access, downloadable formats and even a beta Google Docs live connection integration. We had it set up so that you could hit save in Excel and it would commit a new version for everyone following it to access. git wasn't yet supporting large binary commits very well (not that it's amazing support today) but I remember us going very deep on this python library that fudged support for large binary repos with the glorified equivalent of symlinks. I'm not sure we ever really got this working well and my memory is honestly fuzzy enough that it's getting harder to sort what we did from what I desperately wanted to do before we ran out of cash and I got depressed enough to take two years off and run away to Europe with a crazy person. Humans are funny.

haddr 7y ago

Open source it (if that's possible), let's figure out if there is community who would see value in it!

peteforde 7y ago
Sadly, impossible.
- mercer 7y ago
  Could you explain why (just out of curiosity)?
  - donkeyd 7y ago
    Just going to go out on a limb and say the IP is owned by an investor. Paying 12 people isn't cheap, so that's why I assume there was an investor involved.
    - peteforde 7y ago
      Yes, all of the above. It's quite simply not mine to open source. If it was mine, people dramatically underestimate the effort and cost of supporting the OSS release of something like this. It was also written on what I'm guessing was Rails 3.2 (circa 2011). There was no Docker, no Kubernetes; it was a monolith with many moving parts. I also don't have access to the source code anymore, not easily. It's also true that the company that we started continues to exist with a new product, and I suspect that some of our original code lives on. It's just super messy.
      - mercer 7y ago
        Thanks for elaborating

gwbas1c 7y ago

> but you could sync up to your filesystem via a FUSE wrapper. ... follow or fork ... accept the equivalent of PRs on your Word docs > It was so awesome that we couldn't find anyone to pay for it, sadly. Armchair quarterbacks would fairly accuse us of failing to do proper customer development. I get the impression that it was extremely complicated and didn't fit into anyone's workflow. IE, if you approached someone using Dropbox, they'd have to change far too many habits just to switch to you.

peteforde 7y ago
It was partially this, although Dropbox was not nearly as entrenched in 2011 as it is today... which by extension means that cloud storage was not a given like it is today. It's actually far more appropriate to say that we were competing with a culture where it's engrained in people to make those FINAL_FINAL2 versions on Samba shares. Or worse, to email them. I am biased but I'd give our UX a 7.5/10, and if we'd have continued it would have gotten smoother. The FUSE wrapper was not the primary interface by a long shot, though... in fact, I'm not sure it was used by many people outside of our team, in the end.

fragmede 7y ago

Dropbox has Etherpad-like functionality in its lesser known Dropbox paper product (which I find superior to Google Docs).

Enginerrrd 7y ago

That sounds pretty cool, though I'd have to think about how such a thing would function with the workflow of my team. I think it could be done though! It sounds like a more reliable way to do shared work on office docs. I see some issues with it. No matter how smooth you make this, any software with pull requests is going to be considered "technical". Christ, people think basic excel skills are "technical". SO you have to get over that hurdle. But personally, if I've already gotten people over that hurdle, I might as well just use git and LaTeX documents. I don't know, I think it sounds awesome, but I also think it might be tough to sell.

peteforde 7y ago
We tried to attack the market with a Github model: share your open source data and docs publicly (our true passion) and pay to have private repos. Our mistake, as I said elsewhere, is that there was no market. We had many sales conversations and zero takers. For context, we were fully under the spell of The Great Big Data Hype of 2011 (see the current AI hype for reference) and convinced ourselves that there would be so many opportunities that we'd have our pick of which path to take. In fairness to our past selves, for a while this seemed true; valuations were insane for companies with vague value props in the space. And we met with dozens of influencers in the data world and they all professed to be excited to use it. Most of them ultimately logged in once, realized they had no hair-on-fire problem for us to solve, and stopped returning our emails. It was frustrating in the extreme. I just found one of our product videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4
peteforde 7y ago
Also, we actually did make everything available via git alongside the web frontend, API access, downloadable formats and even a beta Google Docs live connection integration. We had it set up so that you could hit save in Excel and it would commit a new version for everyone following it to access. git wasn't yet supporting large binary commits very well (not that it's amazing support today) but I remember us going very deep on this python library that fudged support for large binary repos with the glorified equivalent of symlinks. I'm not sure we ever really got this working well and my memory is honestly fuzzy enough that it's getting harder to sort what we did from what I desperately wanted to do before we ran out of cash and I got depressed enough to take two years off and run away to Europe with a crazy person. Humans are funny.