I've had tons of friends, family, and co-workers complain that Google Docs' performance is astonishingly shit, and the UI terrible. I know one non-nerd writer w

I've had tons of friends, family, and co-workers complain that Google Docs' performance is astonishingly shit, and the UI terrible. I know one non-nerd writer who does all his writing in some old-ass version of OpenOffice (yes, not even LibreOffice) specifically because he finds Google Docs' poor performance intolerable—so bad that a giant, slow hog like OpenOffice is much better! For my part, I use Pages, because it's got about 2% the effective impact on my overall system responsiveness, of having a Google Docs tab open, and doesn't have painful input latency like GDocs. It's free and available everywhere, so you're not imposing on anyone when you share a doc with them. That's the appeal. ~Nobody I know actually likes it. Googlebucks delivering free service is the reason it's dominant. Easy to win a competition by burning cash. Users would prefer a better product (I'm certain a much better one could even be delivered in the browser—Google's god-awful at writing efficient customer-facing software, especially on the Web) but GDocs wins due to subsidies and network effects. Its winning has little to do with whether customers would prefer native (or just somewhat better in-browser) software. Native v. non-native, maybe they don't care, but good, yes, they care.