From what I know, Google Docs never used CRDT. They adopted Google Wave's algorithm which was taken from Jupiter UI system [1]: operational transformations [2]

From what I know, Google Docs never used CRDT. They adopted Google Wave's algorithm which was taken from Jupiter UI system [1]: operational transformations [2] with conflict resolution on the server side. [1] https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/wave/whitepapers/operational-transform/operational-transform.html https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/wave/whitepapers/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation When the server does ordering operation, operational transformations became a piece of cake to implement and reason about. If you add hierarchical addressing like "book/chapter/section/subsection/paragraph/char", they are also quite conflict free. But you need a central authority. In case of Google, it is easy and fits the profit model. Bonus: https://code.google.com/archive/p/google-mobwrite/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/google-mobwrite/ A library to collaboratively edit HTML forms.