As far as I can tell, in my department Overleaf isn't liked because it's (a) a personal service, (b) a subscription, and (c) from a company that they don't have

As far as I can tell, in my department Overleaf isn't liked because it's (a) a personal service, (b) a subscription, and (c) from a company that they don't have in a labyrinthine Oracle-provided, horrific and IE5 "preferred" online purchasing system [which typically takes ~8 months to be added to]. Of these (b) is really the biggest bugbear because my research fellowship has a fixed budget for a fixed term and monthly subscriptions are basically anathema to the way that they do accounting. I have one piece of commercial FEM software that is only ever "licensed not sold" [annually] -- an annual license is ~£1k; a perpetual one ~£100k. It's quite clear that the company want to go in that direction. I hate it. I don't like subscriptions, and I get riled by central university finance departments every single time... Ironically, laptops and hard drives etc are quite easy to purchase: they count as 'consumables' and I have never worked in a department that actually audits their lifecycle properly -- much like lab reagents, once they're bought, the university [or my interactions with it at any rate] doesn't seem to even care if the first thing I do is throw it in a bin. This is a Good Thing™ as far as I'm concerned. Having decent computing wherever I am is absolutely key to getting my job done. Slightly more on topic, the other thing I would say is that quantitative departments are very good at teaching their students LaTeX, but not necessarily teaching them to it well. I won't exactly say that learning TeX made me a better physicist, but it definitely helped me communicate like a professional one. I interact a lot with doctors and bioscientists -- I basically work in medical imaging -- and trying to cross that divide is very hard; we forget that doing a physics degree gives you lots of transferable skills. Overleaf is excellent at providing a "user-friendly face" for projects that I can share with doctors -- they don't need to understand the code, nor have the distribution installed locally; they can just contribute to a paper in progress quite easily, and in particular it's "track changes" feature is something that they like. My team and I tend to use git and % comments, but the value of a web UI is definitely there. Debugging problems like alluded to in the original article is definitely easier locally, however.